Thomas La Grange

EPFL SB IPHYS LUMES
CH H1 575 (Bâtiment CH)
Station 6
1015 Lausanne

Expertise

Electron Microscopy, Aberration Correct Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy, Electron Diffraction, Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscopy, Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy, Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy, Materials Science, High-speed deformation, Dislocation Dynamics, Skyrmionics, Martensitic Phase Transformation Theory, Solidification

Expertise

Electron Microscopy, Aberration Correct Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy, Electron Diffraction, Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscopy, Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy, Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy, Materials Science, High-speed deformation, Dislocation Dynamics, Skyrmionics, Martensitic Phase Transformation Theory, Solidification
Thomas LaGrange (EPFL, Lausanne) is a materials physicist with an extensive background in electron microscopy techniques, TEM instrumentation development, and laser technology. He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, a master's degree in materials science from Michigan State University, and a Ph.D. in applied physics at école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as a postdoc in 2005 and later as a staff scientist. At LLNL, he developed the Dynamic Transmission Electron Microscope (DTEM) and the Movie Mode DTEM instrumentation, for which he received two R&D100 Awards, Nano50 awards, Microscopy Today Innovation Awards, and several patents on this technology, amongst other awards. He left LLNL and joined Integrated Dynamic Electron Solutions, Inc in 2014 as the Chief Technology Officer. During his time at IDES, he constructed and installed several UTEMs worldwide. Since 2015, he has been a senior scientist and faculty lecturer at EPFL, recently joining the LUMES, the group of Fabrizio Carbone, in 2019. His main scientific interests are the study of non-equilibrium phase transition kinetics, the role of defects' in rapid materials dynamics, and their influence on material's macroscopic behavior in applications. His recent research pursuits extend to developing new ultrafast microscopy approaches to study material dynamics, including time-resolved q-EELS, phase plate imaging, PINEM, and cryo-LTEM techniques.

Teaching & PhD

PhD Students

Paolo Cattaneo, Antoine Nicolas Andrieux

Courses

Electron Matter Interactions in Transmission Electron Microscopy

PHYS-637

This course will present the fundamentals of electron–matter interactions, as occuring in the energy range available in modern transmission electron microscopes, namely 60-300 keV electrons. Diffraction and high-resolution image formation as well as electron energy-loss spectrometry will be covere

Physics of materials

PHYS-307

This course discusses materials physics associated with the mechanical and structural properties of solids, primarily focusing on the physics of dislocation defect dynamics and linking diffusion kinetics to the fundamental physics of phase transformations.