Madhavi Martin is bringing a physicist’s tools and perspective to biological and environmental research at ORNL, supporting advances in bioenergy, soil carbon storage and environmental monitoring, and even helping solve a murder mystery. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Madhavi Martin brings a physicist’s tools and perspective to biological and environmental research at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, supporting advances in bioenergy, soil carbon storage and environmental monitoring, and even helping solve a murder mystery.
Martin’s research revolves around the interaction of light and matter, leveraging a technique called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, or LIBS, that gives scientists the ability to rapidly produce an exact “chemical fingerprint” of a sample.
LIBS uses a laser pulse to create a spark with a miniscule amount of plasma from the material being examined. The plasma emits light at wavelengths unique to the elements present, and the spectral output is processed by a computer. The technique requires little sample preparation and can deliver chemical composition results in near-real time.
While LIBS is most widely used in materials science and in industrial process monitoring, it has also become a popular tool for applications such as medical research and to detect painting forgeries.
Martin, lead for the lab’s Biomaterials and Biomass Characterization group, has used LIBS to detect concentrations of elements in plants and soil that can affect how plants grow and store carbon. Another project helped scientists identify the gene that triggers silicon accumulation in poplar leaves and linked it to cellulose biosynthesis, which relates to biofuels production and carbon sequestration. She also used LIBS to determine how much ash and inorganic material are present in switchgrass, which could affect how the plant’s biomass is broken down and converted into renewable fuels.
She suggested that the lab try the LIBS technique to monitor aerosol emissions at a coal-fired power plant, which led to one of her first big projects. The work was initiated when Martin was a postdoctoral researcher under the mentorship of Mengdawn Cheng, a distinguished scientist who specializes in aerosols research at ORNL. The work was highly successful, yielding large amounts of data and establishing a new paradigm in environmental monitoring.
Segue into biology, environmental science
“That project got me thinking about using LIBS for solid samples like soils, and that research was also successful. When that work became known, it attracted other collaborators who wanted to test the technique on bacteria and then plant leaves, roots and wood samples,” Martin said. By separating out chemical elements with LIBS, Martin could determine, for instance, the different species of trees in a variety of geographical areas that grow naturally in different soils and environments and even the weather conditions in which the trees grow. The findings have factored not only into ORNL’s bioenergy research but also into its climate change science, including how trees respond to controlled burns and wildfire.
“I never imagined in my wildest dreams that being a pure physicist could lead me into such an interesting research area,” Martin said. Now an internationally recognized expert in the use of LIBS for biological and environmental applications, Martin said that especially early in her career, her fellow scientists at academic conferences were often surprised to hear her present on life science applications for LIBS. They often assumed that seeing the topic and ORNL on the agenda meant that she was presenting about nuclear forensics or other materials science.
It was another type of forensics research that resulted in Martin’s most unusual project to date. A professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, had been asked to advise on a murder case. He thought of Martin’s work with wood chemistry and asked her to use LIBS to analyze several wood samples. Unbeknownst to Martin at the time, the logs had been confiscated by Texas police at a crime scene.
Police suspected that some of the same logs used to burn a murder victim’s body in a remote area were later transported and used in a fire pit at a party attended by the suspect. In analyzing the samples, Martin found that the elemental makeup of the logs matched. That and other forensic evidence resulted in a conviction in the case.
Today, Martin continues to expand the breadth of her research, assisting with a project to connect genes to elements in the poplar genome-wide association study dataset assembled by the DOE Center for Bioenergy Innovation based at ORNL. And she’s working with fungal geneticists to better understand the microorganism’s relationship with plants.
Martin is also looking forward to the arrival of an instrument that will enable the use of LIBS on liquid samples. LIBS liquid sampling has been notoriously difficult as droplets excited by the laser tend to splash back on optics equipment. The new instrument resolves this issue and should help speed up the lab’s work in many areas, including in isotopes research and production, in the development of new sustainable aviation fuels and in liquid environmental DNA sampling.
Physics: The ‘queen of science’
Martin credits her parents for her interest in pursuing a career in science. Her father was a physics professor and her mother a professor of education. Martin at one point considered a career in biology or medicine, but a fainting episode during a frog dissection convinced her —and her teacher, who wrote a note to her parents — that a career in medicine might not be the best course.
“That’s when I knew my path would take me in the direction of physics, chemistry and math,” Martin said. Her father highly encouraged her to study physics, noting the field’s reputation as the “queen of science,” Martin recalled.
Martin earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of Nagpur in India, followed by a master’s in solid-state physics at Shivaji University. She then moved to the United States and earned a second master’s and a doctorate in solid-state physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she concentrated on spectroscopic methods for materials science and for the characterization of high-frequency semiconductor devices made of heterogeneous thin films.
After graduating from UCLA, Martin began working for UT-Knoxville in the school’s Measurement and Control Engineering Center. While there she established a Raman spectroscopy-based monitoring system at Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee, to evaluate the company’s distillation column for a key product. The monitoring system identified issues with the column in real time versus a method of weekly sampling, saving the company significant costs, she said.
Martin later joined ORNL as a postdoc with a specialty in spectroscopy and was hired as staff four years later.
As a physicist and group leader, she advises young scientists to actively engage in networking and collaborative science and, most of all, to persevere in pursuit of their research.
“Having a certain stick-to-itiveness is important in science, to push for new ideas and to get projects off the ground and see them through,” Martin said. “It’s also important to find the right people. That’s especially true at the national labs, where we engage in team science to solve challenges with researchers from diverse backgrounds with multiple skills and perspectives. Networking also helps you get through tough times, as your colleagues may have faced similar challenges and can be a sounding board.”
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Stephanie Seay
