1st FRED Awardee Sees Benefits to Science and Diversity
Since receiving RCSA’s first FRED (Frontiers in Research Excellence and Discovery) Award in 2016, Carlos Meriles has made scientific advances opening new routes to quantum information processing and nanoscale sensing. In addition, he says his award has had a positive effect among the students that he and his lab inspire and nurture at the minority-serving City College of New York.
“My group routinely hosts many undergraduate students who come here to learn how science works from within,” he said. “Some have never considered the possibility of going into science, and in many cases, we have witnessed how they reassess their plans and opt for research.”
Training students requires manpower, and Meriles couldn’t do it alone. “Funding for senior postdocs through the FRED award allowed my lab to do more mentoring and training to help bring new people into the scientific life,” he said.
2007 Cottrell Scholar Meriles and his group study the properties of defects in gems, particularly in diamonds, and capitalize on these defects by using light to manipulate spin and charge states. Using laser light and microwave excitation, they can make those defects orient their spin as if in the presence of a magnetic field, and then make them trap or eject an electron depending on their spin state.
This work could help pave the way for a range of applications, including super-dense data storage, sensitivity-enhanced analytical science and imaging, as well as precision sensing at the nanoscale. The impact could be largest in the broad field of quantum information processing.
“One of the main challenges is to controllably position these defects close to another and make them talk to each other,” he said. “Over time we have made sustained progress and we are excited about some quite recent, unpublished results showing we can make these defects controllably exchange charge, using a laser to oblige one defect to release a charge, and to make another defect just a few microns away capture that charge. This opens intriguing opportunities to exchange information between defects, which could be useful for information processing.”
Meriles said the FRED award served literally to seed the project. The award’s high profile also helped gain visibility for his research, exponentially increasing the number of his group’s publications, their appearance in higher-impact journals, and citations.
With more visibility and more results in the lab, Meriles had more opportunities for presenting his work at conferences and participating in panels. “Once the wheels were rolling,” larger grants and collaborations followed, including funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
“It sounds like a cliché, but the FRED award came at the exact right time, when we were just starting to piece things together,” he said. “I am forever thankful to RCSA.”
Beyond his research, Meriles said the FRED award has been a boon to CUNY and the largely minority student population it serves, countering a “pervasive institutional bias in science that favors brand-name, elite institutions.”
“What happens too often in science mirrors what happens in society – those who have more accumulate more, and the gap is widened rather than being bridged,” he said. “That leaves huge numbers of people feeling they’ve been cast aside, that no one cares.”
“Just by looking year after year at the individuals and institutions receiving awards from Research Corporation, it is easy to see there is a broad diversity in the pool of awardees,” he said. “Yes, awards do go to research powerhouses, but this is not necessarily a given, and that really opens up the game for excellent researchers at a variety of institutions.”
That diversity is critical to the future of science, he said.
“My laboratory is providing the first exposure to people from underrepresented groups who would never consider the possibility of exploring science as a career,” he said. “Personally, as an immigrant and as a scientist who works in an institution that is mostly devoted to educating minorities, I feel this type of support is central to ensure a diverse work force and, ultimately, help create a fairer society for all.”
