This Friday, we would like to invite you to the semester’s first 'Junior Faculty Distinguished Lectures'.

This initiative aims to give the junior faculty within the iNANO network a platform to share their expertise and research. Twice a semester two junior faculty (tenure track and fixed-term assistant professors) will be invited to give a 20 min talk. We hope many will attend and engage with the speakers to explore shared interests and potential opportunities to collaboration.

10:15-10:35 Tenure Track Assistant Professor Espen Drath Bøjesen

Studying Materials at the Border Between Order and Disorder
Understanding materials between perfect crystallinity and disorder is a key challenge in nanoscience. In the DISORDER group, we develop experimental methods, computational tools, and frameworks to study structures from atomic to macroscopic scales. This talk highlights two examples illustrating our approach to quantifying disorder and its real-world impact. The first case studies the crystallization of rockwool fibers under heat. Rockwool, used as insulation, relies on its disordered, glass-like structure. Using electron diffraction, X-ray scattering, spectroscopy, and 4D-STEM, we show how nanoscale motifs evolve into crystalline phases. Correlating techniques reveals structural changes hidden in individual methods, providing insights into fire safety, durability, and performance. The second example introduces an automated tool for nanoparticle analysis. Combining electron microscopy and machine learning enables fast, reproducible, and accurate analysis of complex images, reducing bias. This tool benefits nanoscience, catalysis, and fields where particle stats are essential. These projects embody DISORDER’s philosophy: integrating electron microscopy, multi-technique studies, and computational tools to explore the structures of real materials. By viewing disorder as an asset, we develop new methods to understand relations between material structure and function.

10:40-11:00 Assistant Professor Emil Laust Kristoffersen

The circles of life - how RNA-catalysed rolling circle synthesis might play a leading role at the onset of Darwinian evolution
The modern understanding of the origins of life involves emergence of simple “replicators” able to proliferate and evolve in a prebiotic chemical environment. Given enough time, such replicators would have evolved into current biology. The plant-parasitic Viroids represents today’s simplest replicators, copying their tiny circular RNA genome by rolling circle synthesis using hijacked plant enzymes and catalytic RNA folds (ribozymes). Hypothesizing that viroids might teach us how replication can start from scratch, my group investigates viroid replication with a biotechnological bottom-up approach. I have previously shown that the three-step viroid replication can be catalysed by RNA. Now we use directed evolution to improve RNA-catalysed rolling circle synthesis further and study the dynamic nature of nucleic acid base paring. The goal is to establish a new bio-orthogonal replicase, with the same potential as the one that started life.