# Jianwei Miao

Jianwei (John) Miao is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. He performed the first experiment on extending crystallography to allow structural determination of non-crystalline specimens in 1999, which has been known as coherent diffractive imaging (CDI), lensless imaging, or computational microscopy. In 2012, Miao applied the CDI method to pioneer atomic electron tomography (AET), enabling the first determination of 3D atomic structures without assuming crystallinity or averaging. In 2025, he published a single-author review article in Nature titled "Computational microscopy with coherent diffractive imaging and ptychography", which encapsulates 25 years of advancements in computational imaging that have fundamentally transformed the field of microscopy. Miao is the father of Jennifer Miao who is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, a Gates scholar, researching membrane proteins.

## Career

Miao received a BS in physics from Hangzhou University (now Zhejiang University) in 1991, and an MS in physics from the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1994. He then moved to the U.S. and received a PhD in physics, an M.S. in computer science, and an advanced graduate certificate in biomedical engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1999. After obtaining his PhD, Miao became a staff scientist in the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2004, he moved to UCLA as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2009. He has served as the Deputy Director of the STROBE NSF Science and Technology Center since 2016.

## Research

Miao pioneered the development of novel imaging methods using x-rays and electrons, and contributed to theory, computation, and experiment. He proposed the oversampling ratio concept in 1998, which explains under what conditions the phase problem of non-crystalline specimens can be solved. In 1999, he conducted the first CDI experiment at the National Synchrotron Light Source, Brookhaven National Laboratory. CDI methods, such as conventional CDI, ptychography (i.e., scanning CDI) and Bragg CDI, have been broadly implemented using synchrotron radiation, x-ray free electron lasers, high harmonic generation, electron and optical microscopy. It has also become one of the justifications for the construction of x-ray free electron lasers worldwide.
In 2012, Miao applied CDI phase retrieval algorithms to tomography and demonstrated AET at 2.4 Å resolution without assuming crystallinity. He then applied AET to observe nearly all the atoms in a Pt nanoparticle, and imaged the 3D core structure of edge and screw dislocations at atomic resolution. In 2015, he determined the 3D coordinates of thousands of individual atoms in a material with a 3D precision of 19 pm and addressed Richard Feynman’s 1959 challenge. Later, Miao measured the 3D coordinates of more than 23,000 atoms in an FePt nanoparticle, and correlated chemical order/disorder and crystal defects with material properties at the single-atom level. In 2019, he developed 4D AET to observe crystal nucleation at atomic resolution, showing early stage nucleation results contradict classical nucleation theory. Miao also demonstrated scanning AET (sAET) to correlate the 3D atomic defects and electronic properties of 2D materials. In 2021, he determined for the first time the 3D atomic structure of amorphous solids and observed the medium-range order in amorphous materials.

## Awards

* Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award, 1999
* Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, 2006
* Kavli Frontiers Fellow, 2010
* Theodore von Kármán Fellowship, RWTH Aachen University, Germany, 2013
* University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study (USIAS) Fellowship, France, 2015
* Fellow, American Physical Society, 2016
* Special NSF Creativity Award, 2018
* Innovation in Materials Characterization Award, Materials Research Society, 2021