Ondrej Krivanek is a physicist of Czech and British nationality, resident in the United States. Born in Prague, he moved to the UK in the late 1960s where he obtained a degree at the University of Leeds, before moving to Cambridge to work on his PhD in electron microscopy with Archie Howie.
After Cambridge, Krivanek had postdoctoral positions in Kyoto, at Bell Labs and at UC Berkeley. During his time in Berkeley he became interested in electron energy loss spectroscopy and built his own spectrometer. He became an assistant professor and associate director of the NSF HREM Facility at Arizona State University in 1980, and at the same time started collaborating with Gatan Inc., first as a consultant, before moving permanently to the company and becoming its R&D director.
In 1995 he went back to Cambridge with a grant from the Royal Society to work with Mick Brown and Andrew Bleloch on aberration correction of electron lenses. His advances enabled him and Niklas Dellby to start Nion Co. in 1997, a company of which he is still president. With Niklas Dellby and IBM’s Phil Batson, he obtained sub-ångström resolution with a scanning transmission electron microscope, with the results published in 2002.
Ondrej Krivanek is one of the major experts in electron microscopy and electron energy loss spectroscopy. He has received a number of awards, including the Duddell Medal and Prize of the British Institute of Physics, and the Cosslett Medal from the International Federation of Microscopy Societies. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics, the Microscopy Society of America, and of the American Physical Society, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society.