Manuel Vejar
Postdoctoral Fellow
Manuel (Manny) Vejar is a postdoctoral scholar at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, specializing in synchrotron x-ray fluorescence imaging and spectroscopy on environmental and rhizosphere related samples (sediments, plants, and fungi) at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource.
He received his Ph.D. in the Civil & Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences department at the University of Notre Dame in 2024. His doctoral research focused on the impacts of iron-oxide mineral complexity on the fate and transport in nuclear waste repository and/or legacy environmental contamination settings. Specifically, he studied the influence of Al-substitution in iron (oxyhydr)oxide minerals on the redox and speciation behavior of plutonium at the mineral-water interface, employing M4-edge high-energy resolution fluorescence-detected X-ray absorption near-edge structure (HERFD-XANES) spectroscopy to determine the oxidation state and L3-edge extended X-ray absorption fine-structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy to determine coordination environment of the plutonium associated with these minerals.
He has growing expertise with synchrotron techniques (micro-X-ray fluorescence imaging, XANES, and EXAFS), and their applications to study contaminants in environmental systems. During his career, Manny has conducted work at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, the Advanced Photon Source, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, while collaborating with Chapman University, the Institute of Resource Ecology at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, and more recently Oakridge and Livermore national labs. Prior to his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame, Manny obtained his B.Sc. in Geology from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.