Dr. Anders Nilsson

     Dr. Anders Nilsson is a professor at Stockholm University. He has been published in more than 300 papers with a wide range of disciplines. Dr. Nilsson has been published in Nature, Science, PNAS, Nature Chemistry, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters, JACS, Angewandte, JCP, Nano letters, and many more. He has even gained his recognition by being cited more than 20000 times on google scholar, 15000 times on ISI Web of Science, and once in an edited book. His knowledge has obviously not gone unnoticed. Dr. Nilsson took an interesting approach to his education. For example, for high school, he went to a technical high school which was focused on chemistry. Then he got his master’s of science in chemical engineering. Nearly nine years later he got his Ph. D in physics where his thesis was specialized in “Core Level Electron Spectroscopy Studies of Surface and Absorbates.” Lastly, he got his docent in Physics. All of this education stayed in Sweden. 

Starting in 1978, Dr. Nilsson began a long line of academic professional experience. He started as a teaching assistant, graduating to a research assistant, to a visiting scientist, to a lecturer, to an associate professor at Stanford University, to the chair of the Photon Science Faculty at Stanford, and currently as a professor in chemical physics at Stockholm University. However, his academic experience extends into many other professional services as a co-organizer for workshops, lecturers, committee members, representatives of meetings, national coordinators, members of boards, directors of programs, deputy directors, faculty opponents on Ph. D thesis reviews, to many more experiences. His time stretched across the globe to Japan, Baltimore, the U.K., Denmark, and many more places. Over his time he earned many awards and honors that proved his educational experience. Lastly, he was an invited speaker at more than 130 international conferences and 90 colloquiums at Universities and National Labs. One thing I found interesting about his educational experience was his combination of chemistry and physics. He started his professional career and interest in chemistry, but then grew into getting a Ph. D in physics. He was able to connect two of his interests into one area of research that he excelled at which led him to the top of the physics leader boards.

In 2004, Dr. Nilsson started his research with water and it became one of the top 10 most important scientific breakthroughs of the year and he has continued that research up until now. His most recent research being posted in Physics Today on November 19th, 2020 titled “Fast X-Ray Scattering Reveals Water’s Two Liquid Phases.” This new experiment was brought forth by Dr. Nilsson and his team that combines low temperature, high pressure, and fast measurement to examine the phase transition that has been hypothesized many times before. This allows for them to look at the states of matter when water is in between the liquid-water phase. This new approach is heating amorphous ice then zapping a thin film of the high-density amorphous ice with an IR laser pulse. This will allow for a small amount of liquid to be made. This liquid will quickly decompress then refreeze and during that expansion, the researchers can probe it with an x-ray pulse timed with the IR pulse to reveal the never-before-seen water phase behavior. The figure below shows the distinct liquid phases of lower density and overall the liquid-liquid transition can be experimentally examined. This work is very groundbreaking and allows for many possible future experiments to occur by studying water’s unusual behavior.

Works Cited: 

Anders nilsson—Stockholms universitet. (n.d.). Retrieved November 28, 2020, from https://www.su.se/profiles/andersn-1.186733

Aut, L. M. J. author. (2020). Fast x-ray scattering reveals water’s two liquid phases (world). https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.6.1.20201119a