The first step to bridging this gap often starts with providing accessibility in its many forms to those who need it. Physicist Michael Lodge ’18PhD, who has used a wheelchair since he was 8 years old and is now a nanotechnology research fellow at Nanyang Technological şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in Singapore, is just one example of the difference that accessibility can make.

“Why should someone be excluded from a tradition as old as humanity itself simply because they’re disabled?” – Michael Lodge ’18PhD

“Science is fundamental to the pursuit of knowledge. It is how we have advanced as a species,” Lodge says. “Why should someone be excluded from a tradition as old as humanity itself simply because they’re disabled?”

Lodge was left paraplegic as a child after undergoing surgery to remove a tumor embedded in his spine. Since then, the Sanford native has used a wheelchair to navigate the world. While Lodge says he has learned to adapt to the challenges he faces, he encountered a major obstacle as he began to do experimental research.

“It’s a blow to the ego when your disability curtails your options, however it’s downright devastating when your disability is the sole thing preventing you from seizing a great opportunity that has been handed to you,” Lodge says.

Gaining Experience

After coming to UCF in 2007, Lodge began working as a graduate student in Professor of Masahiro Ishigami’s lab. In order to make sure Lodge could make use of the space, Ishigami worked with him to make the lab more accessible by moving things to a reachable distance and allow more room for the wheelchair’s movements. Improving accessibility for Lodge came naturally to Ishigami, as his father was a medical specialist who provides rehabilitation to patients who have been disabled by injuries, diseases, conditions or disorders.  The American Disability Act defines a disability as “a physical or mental impairment that limits one or more major life activities.”

“For me, this is something we have to solve; it’s something I was familiar with. For me, he was just another person.” – Professor of Physics Masahiro Ishigami

“I use to tell Mike my weakness is I can’t actually see that he’s different from anyone else,” Ishigami says. “For some people this is an insurmountable problem. For me, this is something we have to solve; it’s something I was familiar with. For me, he was just another person.”

Lodge immediately demonstrated tremendous talent, Ishigami says. Within a few months he was able to teach himself to create graphene, a single-atom layer of graphite that is very difficult to make. Ishigami then arranged for him to participate in other research projects, but the lack of accessibility in other labs prevented Lodge from gaining experience.

“We realized at that point if he’s going to have a career in [the scientific field], he’s going to have to engineer solutions so that he can improve accessibility himself,” Ishigami says.

Engineering Solutions

At UCF, Ishigami continued to support Lodge’s experimental-research efforts and eventually was able to get a custom-designed $14,000 wheelchair, with the cost covered entirely by the wheelchair company, a grant from the National Science Foundation and UCF’s . The motorized wheelchair allows Lodge to increase his elevation by 11 inches, which enables him to use special microscopes and other tools.

“[The wheelchair] is essentially the difference between me being an independent person in the lab and me having to shelve projects until someone can help me do something mundane, like reach a canister of glue on a high shelf or look at a sample through the slightly too-high window on a vacuum chamber,” Lodge says.

Expanding Opportunities

Eventually, Lodge was able to use the wheelchair abroad for the first time when he was selected from a group of 199 candidates for a two-month research project in Australia at the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes. There, he got to enjoy the beautiful sites of region, while building important connections.

“For many disabled people, there are steps that can be taken to improve accessibility to a point that the person’s limitations become minor.” – Michael Lodge ’18PhD

“The people in and around the lab [in Australia] were very personable and knowledgeable, and they made it easy to really network with other scientists. In fact, I met my current boss while I was working there,” Lodge says.

After graduating in the summer, Lodge was able to keep the wheelchair Ishigami acquired for him.

“I think many of the issues that disabled people have with pursuing a career in science, and perhaps other aspects of life, is that they focus on the reasons why they would inconvenience or be rejected by a professor, a group, or their field of interest as a whole. The truth is that these perceived barriers are usually way less serious than they think,” Lodge says. “Masa [Ishigami] was not only able to look past my disability, he was considerate of it and actively made my life easier.”

Now working in his field, Lodge has become a researcher at the Nanyang Technological şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in Singapore. There he uses the skills he learned in Ishigami’s lab and in Australia, to study the electronic properties of materials that conduct electricity in unusual ways. The science he is developing will be used for future electronics that will be created over the next 20 years.

That changed on Thursday, when – after months of preparation – a new high-tech wheelchair was delivered to Lodge at the physics lab where he’s conducted research for the past four years. The power wheelchair has a “seat elevator” capable of lifting Lodge to a height that allows him to work with scientific instruments that have been out of reach until now. He can move around the lab safely, for the first time at eye level with his fellow researchers.

“I’m very excited, not just about getting the wheelchair, but also what it represents,” said Lodge, 28, who was left paraplegic at age 8 after surgery to remove a tumor embedded in his spine. “Traditionally there aren’t that many people with mobility impairments in science because of the barriers. Being in a wheelchair, unfortunately, does limit your opportunities. With this, it’s a whole new world of opportunities that were closed off.”

Physics professor Masa Ishigami helped arrange for the $14,000 wheelchair at no cost to Lodge. Manufacturer Amysystems agreed to discount the price of the wheelchair by half. A portion of a National Science Foundation grant brought the cost down further. And when he learned of the effort, Michael Johnson, dean of the UCF College of Sciences, arranged for UCF to cover the rest of the cost. The wheelchair was delivered to Lodge by distributor Majors Medical Supply of DeLand on Thursday afternoon. Lodge took it directly to the physics lab where he conducts his research.

“He’s one of the best students I’ve worked with at UCF, hands down. I think this wheelchair will help him achieve even more,” Ishigami said.

Lodge has interned at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and has developed a new technique to measure the friction properties of ultra-thin sheets of graphene.

See video from FOX35 news .

This discovery by the team paves the way for engineering new types of extraordinary nanoscale materials that can be used to develop smaller, lighter and faster electronics, including sensors, cell phones, tablets and laptops.

First predicted by American physicist Douglas Hofstadter in 1976, the butterfly pattern emerges when electrons are confined to a two-dimensional plane and subjected to both a periodic potential energy and a strong magnetic field. The Hofstadter butterfly is a fractal pattern—meaning that it contains shapes that repeat on smaller and smaller size scales. Fractals are common in systems such as fluid mechanics, but rare in the quantum mechanical world. The Hofstadter butterfly is one of the first quantum fractals theoretically discovered in physics but, until now, there has been no direct experimental proof of this spectrum.

Columbia şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą led the study and also involved scientists from the City şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of New York, Tohoku şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. Columbia prepared the sample and the UCF team measured the regular recurrence of the high-fidelity periodic pattern, engineered by inducing nanoscale ripples on graphene, a carbon material. The measured recurrence served as the essential proof that the measured spectrum was indeed the Hofstadter butterfly. The image that captured the evidence was taken in UCF Assistant Professor Masa Ishigami’s laboratory.

The study is published in the advance .

Jyoti Katoch, Ishigami’s graduate student, used a non-contact atomic force high-resolution microscope to image the ripples, which have the height of only 0.2 angstroms (twenty trillionth of a meter), to confirm that the observed Hofstadter butterfly spectrum indeed matched the theoretical prediction.

“The arrangement of individual atoms, even just one atom can drastically alter properties of nanoscale materials. That is the basis for nanotechnology,” Ishigami said. “Atomic structures must be resolved to understand the properties of nanoscale materials. What we do here at UCF is to explain why nanoscale materials behave so different by resolving their atomic structures. Only when we understand the origin of the extraordinary properties of nanoscale materials, we can propel nanoscience and technology forward. What Jyoti has done here is to image how graphene is rippled to explain the observed Hofstadter spectrum.”

UCF’s laboratory utilizes a novel, the state-of-the-art microscopy technique to simultaneously determine the atomic structure and electronic properties of nanoscale materials such as graphene.

Katoch has been working with Ishigami since 2008, when Ishigami joined UCF. Katoch helped build the laboratory and developed the atomic-resolution capability critical to capturing the picture proof for this study.

Ishigami has a Ph.D. in physics from the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has won multiple awards, including the Intelligence Community postdoctoral fellowship and the Hertz graduate fellowship, and has published more than 30 papers in journals including Science.

The College of Sciences, the Nanoscience technology center, and the office of research and commercialization (through a Presidential Initiative to fund major research equipment) supported the purchase and development of the atomic resolution microscope in the Ishigami lab. This research effort was supported by the National Science Foundation under its Faculty Early Career Development Program.