The Berkeley Lab Postdoc Association is an organization run by and for about 1000 postdocs and early career scientists working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. We organize many activities to strengthen our ties to the Lab, to each other and to the (Berkeley) Bay Area. Our goal is to facilitate social interactions, scientific exchanges, seminars and general orientation.
 
Arnoud Everhardt – Energy Sciences

Arnoud Everhardt – Energy Sciences

Fadji Maina, Sneha Jani, and Ro-Ya Liu 

Dear Arnoud, the BLPA team is forever grateful and thankful for your great contributions to our community!

Words Arnoud Lives By: “Failure is the best teacher”

Arnoud’s journey to Berkeley Lab

Arnoud Everhardt was born in The Netherlands and did all his studies including a Ph.D. at the University of Groningen. He moved to the US with the mindset of you can make anything happen and now works on enhancing the properties of his weird and extremely cool materials under the Lab’s Quantum Materials Program in the Ramesh Group.

…New country, new research

As part of his PhD, Arnoud developed a piezoelectric material to convert vibrations that are all around us into electrical energy – a piece of fundamental research that comes very close to applications. His passion for advanced material synthesis and eagerness to have a professional experience abroad brought him to Berkeley Lab, where he is working on a collaborative project between LBNL and Intel co. The project aims to replace the CMOS (Complementary Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor) by the MESO (MagnetoElectric Spin-Orbit) logic device in the transistor industry. MESO is the hope for highly efficient and downsizing devices that consume very little energy. In such a big challenge where the key factor is the synthesis of quantum materials and their heterostructures,  Arnoud was lucky to benefit from collaborations with scientists from academia and industry. Blessed by a strong background in fundamental material science, he built up the integrated synthesis system – pulsed laser deposition (PLD) – chamber from scratch and trained 6 scientists to run the system independently. 

Arnoud is proud to be part of this innovative research project focused on the science of tomorrow.

What’re his next steps?

Arnoud is heading back to his home and great country, the Netherlands, at the end of this month. He is looking forward to starting an industry job surrounded by family and friends. His experience in the US has been tremendous, and he will bring back the best he learned here. One of his precious take-home lessons is: “if you have an idea, just do it, to succeed, you will have to fail”.

“Proud to serve the postdoc community!”

Moving to a new country can be intimidating and many of us, sometimes, feel alone… Arnoud joined BLPA as a board member. He contributed to make the association more professional and structured, lead the outdoor committee and successfully launch LINC.

Advice for new postdocs…

Don’t be shy! Get out of the postdocs’ bubble and network, LBNL employees are incredibly nice and the connections you will build at the Lab will be the greatest asset of your career!

Interviewed and written by Fadji Maina, Sneha Jani, and Ro-Ya Liu – On behalf of BLPA