Susan Monarez is no longer the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a post by the official Department of Health and Human Services X account. She had been in the position for just a month. In the wake of her apparent ouster, several other CDC leaders have resigned.

Named acting CDC director in January, Monarez was officially confirmed to the position by the Senate on July 29 and sworn in two days later. During her brief tenure, the CDC’s main campus in Atlanta was attacked by a gunman who blamed the Covid-19 vaccine for making him sick and depressed. A local police officer, David Rose, was killed by the suspect when responding to the shooting.

In a statement Wednesday evening Mark Zaid and Abbe David Lowell, Monarez’s lawyers, alleged that she had been “targeted” for refusing “to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” The statement further says that Monarez has not resigned and does not plan to, and claims that she has not received notification that she’s been fired.

According to emails obtained by WIRED, at least three other senior CDC officials resigned Wednesday evening: Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Debra Houry, chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science; and Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.

More resignations are expected to become public soon, say CDC with knowledge of the departures.

“I worry that political appointees will not make decisions on the science, but instead focus on supporting the administration’s agenda,” says one CDC employee, who was granted anonymity out of concerns over retribution. “I worry that the next directors will not support and protect staff.”

President Donald Trump’s original pick to lead the CDC was David Weldon, a physician and previous Republican congressman from Florida who had a history of making statements questioning the safety of vaccines. But hours before his Senate confirmation hearing in March, the White House withdrew Weldon’s nomination. The administration then nominated Monarez.

The CDC leadership exits come amid recent vaccine policy upheaval by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in May removed the Covid-19 vaccine from the list CDC’s recommended vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women. The following month, he fired all 17 sitting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group of independent experts that makes science-based recommendations on vaccines.

In their place, he installed eight new members, including several longtime vaccine critics. “A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy said in a statement at the time.

Earlier this month under Kennedy’s leadership, HHS canceled a half billion dollars in funding for research on mRNA vaccines. This month HHS also announced the reinstatement of the Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, a federal advisory panel created by Congress in 1986 to improve vaccine safety and oversight for children in the US. The panel was disbanded in 1998, when it issued its final report. Public health experts worry that the panel is a move to further undermine established vaccine science.

MIT researchers have developed a technique that enables real-time, 3D monitoring of corrosion, cracking, and other material failure processes inside a nuclear reactor environment.

This could allow engineers and scientists to design safer nuclear reactors that also deliver higher performance for applications like electricity generation and naval vessel propulsion.

During their experiments, the researchers utilized extremely powerful X-rays to mimic the behavior of neutrons interacting with a material inside a nuclear reactor.

They found that adding a buffer layer of silicon dioxide between the material and its substrate, and keeping the material under the X-ray beam for a longer period of time, improves the stability of the sample. This allows for real-time monitoring of material failure processes.

By reconstructing 3D image data on the structure of a material as it fails, researchers could design more resilient materials that can better withstand the stress caused by irradiation inside a nuclear reactor.

“If we can improve materials for a nuclear reactor, it means we can extend the life of that reactor. It also means the materials will take longer to fail, so we can get more use out of a nuclear reactor than we do now. The technique we’ve demonstrated here allows to push the boundary in understanding how materials fail in real-time,” says Ericmoore Jossou, who has shared appointments in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), where he is the John Clark Hardwick Professor, and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

Jossou, senior author of a study on this technique, is joined on the paper by lead author David Simonne, an NSE postdoc; Riley Hultquist, a graduate student in NSE; Jiangtao Zhao, of the European Synchrotron; and Andrea Resta, of Synchrotron SOLEIL. The research is published in the journal Scripta Materiala.

“Only with this technique can we measure strain with a nanoscale resolution during corrosion processes. Our goal is to bring such novel ideas to the nuclear science community while using synchrotrons both as an X-ray probe and radiation source,” adds Simonne.

Real-time imaging

Studying real-time failure of materials used in advanced nuclear reactors has long been a goal of Jossou’s research group.

Usually, researchers can only learn about such material failures after the fact, by removing the material from its environment and imaging it with a high-resolution instrument.

“We are interested in watching the process as it happens. If we can do that, we can follow the material from beginning to end and see when and how it fails. That helps us understand a material much better,” he says.

They simulate the process by firing an extremely focused X-ray beam at a sample to mimic the environment inside a nuclear reactor. The researchers must use a special type of high-intensity X-ray, which is only found in a handful of experimental facilities worldwide.

For these experiments they studied nickel, a material incorporated into alloys that are commonly used in advanced nuclear reactors. But before they could start the X-ray equipment, they had to prepare a sample.

To do this, the researchers used a process called solid state dewetting, which involves putting a thin film of the material onto a substrate and heating it to an extremely high temperature in a furnace until it transforms into single crystals.

“We thought making the samples was going to be a walk in the park, but it wasn’t,” Jossou says.

As the nickel heated up, it interacted with the silicon substrate and formed a new chemical compound, essentially derailing the entire experiment. After much trial-and-error, the researchers found that adding a thin layer of silicon dioxide between the nickel and substrate prevented this reaction.

But when crystals formed on top of the buffer layer, they were highly strained. This means the individual atoms had moved slightly to new positions, causing distortions in the crystal structure.

Phase retrieval algorithms can typically recover the 3D size and shape of a crystal in real-time, but if there is too much strain in the material, the algorithms will fail.

However, the team was surprised to find that keeping the X-ray beam trained on the sample for a longer period of time caused the strain to slowly relax, due to the silicon buffer layer. After a few extra minutes of X-rays, the sample was stable enough that they could utilize phase retrieval algorithms to accurately recover the 3D shape and size of the crystal.

“No one had been able to do that before. Now that we can make this crystal, we can image electrochemical processes like corrosion in real time, watching the crystal fail in 3D under conditions that are very similar to inside a nuclear reactor. This has far-reaching impacts,” he says.

They experimented with a different substrate, such as niobium doped strontium titanate, and found that only a silicon dioxide buffered silicon wafer created this unique effect.

An unexpected result

As they fine-tuned the experiment, the researchers discovered something else.

They could also use the X-ray beam to precisely control the amount of strain in the material, which could have implications for the development of microelectronics.

In the microelectronics community, engineers often introduce strain to deform a material’s crystal structure in a way that boosts its electrical or optical properties.

“With our technique, engineers can use X-rays to tune the strain in microelectronics while they are manufacturing them. While this was not our goal with these experiments, it is like getting two results for the price of one,” he adds.

In the future, the researchers want to apply this technique to more complex materials like steel and other metal alloys used in nuclear reactors and aerospace applications. They also want to see how changing the thickness of the silicon dioxide buffer layer impacts their ability to control the strain in a crystal sample.

“This discovery is significant for two reasons. First, it provides fundamental insight into how nanoscale materials respond to radiation—a question of growing importance for energy technologies, microelectronics, and quantum materials. Second, it highlights the critical role of the substrate in strain relaxation, showing that the supporting surface can determine whether particles retain or release strain when exposed to focused X-ray beams,” says Edwin Fohtung, an associate professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who was not involved with this work.

This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.

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