Kayla X Nguyen

Kayla X. Nguyen (born 1989) is a physicist and assistant professor on the faculty of the University of Oregon. She co-invented the Electron Microscope Pixel Array Detector (EMPAD), a camera displaying images at a very high level of detail. Her research involves computational tools and instrumentation to visualize and measure individual atoms.

Early life and education Kayla Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1989, and was four years old when her family immigrated to the United States from a refugee camp in Thailand. At age nine, she was inspired when she heard Sally Ride speak at an event encouraging "more women and girls to pursue careers in STEM". a camera that "takes pictures using electrons and can detect and display them at an unprecedented level of detail".

Career During her post-doc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2019–2023, Nguyen was named by The Japan Times as one of "Five pioneering Asian scientists to look out for this year". The article reported, "Nguyen's research has the potential to improve medicine and technology with new treatments for cancer and possible cures for Alzheimer's. It can enhance drug delivery systems, make fuel-cell cars more accessible and quicken computer processing, among other things." Nguyen's research involves physics, materials science and computer science, focusing on the next generation of electron microscope technology, including computational tools and instrumentation to visualize and measure individual atoms. She has said, "When you design detectors, microscopes or new computational frameworks, you're really designing new ways to look at the microscopic world... Once you have the tool, anyone — biologists, chemists, physicists — can use it to ask their own questions." Beckman Young Investigators Award (2025) L'Oréal For Women in Science (2020) Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow (2019) Lemelson–MIT Student Prize winner (2018)

Selected publications