Dr Irit Rosenhek-Goldian

Irit Rosenhek-Goldian is a staff scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS), Israel, specializing applications of SPM. She explores diverse fields through collaborations with various research groups within and outside the WIS institute. These studies include nano mechanical measurements of a wide variety of materials from soft cells, extracellular vesicles and tissues to hard bones/fibrils and also stones and crystals. She has also worked extensively on electrical measurements such as conductivity measurements and Scanning Kelvin Probe Microscopy (KPFM). This diversity was one of the driving forces for her choice of career path in this unit and what motivates her to constantly learn new fields and help push their scientific frontiers. 

A small sampling of recent projects includes:

Investigating the role of malaria-infected extracellular vesicles on red blood cell structure and mechanics, implementing fast AFM and convolutional neural networks.

In the field of photovoltaics she has investigated the role of humidity on mechanical properties of different Pb-based halide perovoskite, combining data both from AFM and instrumented nanoindentation.

Using KPFM she investigated the electron transfer in donor acceptor heterojunctions and the shifts in Fermi-level of suspended single-layer graphene at the liquid-solid interface under electrochemical reaction conditions.

Irit Rosenhek-Goldian

Recent AFM-related papers:

• Eliaz D.,  Paul S.,  Benyamin D.,  Cernescu A., Cohen S. R.,  Rosenhek-Goldian I., Brookstein O.,  Miali M.E.,  Solomonov A.,  Greenblatt M., Levy Y., Raviv U., Barth A., Shimanovich U., (2022) Micro and nano-scale compartments guide the structural transition of silk protein monomers into silk fibers, Nature Communications, 13, 7856. 

• Khatun S., Andrés M. A., Cohen S. R., Kaplan-Ashiri I., Brontvein O., Rosenhek-Goldian I., Weatherup R. S., Eren B. (2022) Electronic Interactions and Stability Issues at the Copper-Graphene Interface in Air and in Alkaline Solution Under Electrochemical Control, Electrochimica Acta, 431, 141145.

• Buchine I., Rosenhek-Goldian I., Jasti N. P., Ceratti D. R., Kumar S., Cahen D., Cohen S., (2022) Nanomechanical signatures of degradation-free influence of water on halide perovskite mechanics, Communications Materials, 3, 70.

• Abou Karam P., Rosenhek-Goldian I., Ziv T., Ben Ami Pilo H.,  Azuri I., Rivkin A., Kiper E., Rotkopf R., Cohen S. R., Claudia Torrecilhas A., Avinoam O., Rojas A., Morandi M.I., Regev-Rudzki N., (2022) Malaria parasites release vesicle subpopulations with signatures of different destinations, EMBO Reports, 23:e54755.

• Azuri, I., Rosenhek-Goldian, I., Regev-Rudzki, N., Fantner, G., Cohen, S. R., (2021) Review – the role of convolution neural networks in scanning probe microscopy, Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology, 12, 878–901.

Biography: Irit is a staff scientist in the Scanning Probe Microscopy unit in the Department of Chemical Research Support at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. Since Irit joined the SPM unit in 2017 (managed by Dr. Sidney R. Cohen), she was involved in a variety of scientific projects from nano- to bio- materials. She received her Ph.D. at the Department of Materials and Interfaces, Weizmann Institute of Science (with Jacob Klein, 2015) specialized in surface interactions and friction measurements using the surface force balance technique.

Website: https://www.weizmann.ac.il/ChemicalResearchSupport/units/spm/about-us

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Also, check out our previous March and November 2021 Women in AFM blog posts to read about more researchers.

Why are we celebrating women in AFM? (March 2021)

Why do we need to highlight women in AFM? (Nov 2021)