NUANCE Welcomes New Staff Members!

NUANCE has welcomed two new staff members over the past month.

Young Kasarski joined NUANCE as a financial administrator in April. Young has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in accounting from Loyola University Chicago. Prior to coming to NUANCE, she worked in Accounting Services for Research and Sponsored Programs (ASRSP) managing sub-awards. Before that, she worked in a corporate environment as a senior accountant for several years.

NUANCE also welcomed Dr. Paul Smeets as a research associate. Dr. Smeets completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. He earned his PhD in molecular systems there in 2016 for his research on the early stages of calcium carbonate mineralization, which included research partially performed at the Molecular Foundry of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After obtaining his PhD degree, he pursued a postdoctoral position within the Materials Science and Engineering department at Northwestern University, where he focused on advanced characterization of biominerals at the nano- and atomic scale. Having more than 10 years of experience in materials characterization using advanced (scanning) transmission electron microscopy, Dr. Smeets specializes in probing structure-property relationships in hybrid organic-inorganic materials using cryo-(S)TEM and analytical (S)TEM. He received a number of awards, including the 2018 and 2019 Microscopy and Microanalysis (M&M) Postdoctoral Scholar Award and the 2018 KNCV Piet Bennema Award for Crystal Growth. Dr. Smeets’ daily responsibilities include JEOL ARM300F/FEI Helios FIB-SEM management, user training, technical development, individual and collaborative research, and teaching lab classes.

NUANCE is excited to have them both on board!