About Joshua Turner

Dr. Joshua Turner joined SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory as a staff scientist at the Linac Coherent Light Source, the world's first hard X-ray laser. He specializes in ultra-fast soft X-ray studies, which have been applied to an array of scientific fields, from chemistry and solids state physics to solid density plasmas found in large planets and laboratory astrophysics. He is currently pursuing X-ray laser measurements on the behavior of novel types of materials such as high-temperature superconductors.

He received both a BS in Physics and a BA degree in Mathematics from UC Santa Barbara before earning a Masters degree in Physics from Boston University. He went on to pursue a PhD in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Oregon. During his doctoral studies, Joshua was an Advanced Light Source Doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, but also spent time at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York in the Condensed Matter Physics and Material Science Department, where he worked on hard X-ray diffraction experiments. He eventually moved to Stony Brook University in New York for a Postdoctoral Fellowship where he specialized in Coherent Diffraction Imaging, a method of using mathematical algorithms to replace the lenses in X-ray experiments to image nanoscopic objects at finer resolution than what is capable with X-ray lenses. This was mainly applied to biological cells, but also included materials useful in alternative energy applications.