Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility

Outreach

SMIF Outreach Team visits classrooms, hosts lab tours, and let kids play with expensive equipment (supervised!). It’s SMIF’s way of showing them how fun and fascinating STEM can be.

A variety of lithography, deposition, and etching tools in the SMIF cleanroom enable micro- and nano-scale fabrication of electronics, optics, microfluidics, metamaterials, and more! SMIF can facilitate your research and development fabrication needs.

Characterization

SMIF’s characterization tools help visualize and analyze samples at the micro- and nano-scale. SMIF facilitates investigation of a variety of sample types with a wide array of equipment: SEM, TEM, Mass Spec, Micro-CT, Optical Spectroscopy, AFM, along with Soft Materials and X-ray Characterization Equipment.

Staff

SMIF staff hold expertise across a wide range of fields and will help you with your nano-characterization and fabrication needs.

Cryo-TEM

SMIF’s state-of-the-art cryo-TEM microscopes allow the analysis of biological samples under cryogenic conditions, enabling the determination of high-resolution 3D structures.

The Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMIF) at Duke University is an interdisciplinary, shared resource open to Duke University researchers from all schools and departments—as well as to users from other universities, government laboratories and industry.

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Publications

Goldsmith, E. R. and M. R. Stocker (2025). "A detailed redescription of a skeletally immature 'Redondasaurus' suggests ontogenetic transformations in the taxon mirror phytosaurian morphological evolution." The Anatomical Record.

https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70076

Instrument used: MicroCT

Ratkiewicz, A., M. C. Granatosky, C. E. Davis, J. Molnar, A. Hartstone-Rose and E. Dickinson (2025) "Multi-method analysis for the three-dimensional reconstruction of muscle fascicles from DiceCT datasets." The Anatomical Record: 1-20.

https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70088

Instrument used: MicroCT

Nguyen, K. T., J. Xia, C. Chang, A. Ghosh, M. D. Hade, X. Y. Rima, J. Y. An, S. E. Oh, B. H. Min, C. K. Nagaraj, S. M. Magaña, L. Wang, T. J. Huang, F. Li, Y. Kim, D. T. W. Wong and E. Reátegui (2025) "Extracellular Particles to Track Cancer Biomarkers from Tissue to Biofluids." Journal of Dental Research.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00220345251397369

Instrument used: Cleanroom

Outreach

Cleanroom

Characterization

Staff

Cryo-TEM

Publications

SMIF in the News

Call for Nominations for the Inaugural SMIF Outstanding Paper Awards