From the Director
Here at CHESS, we held our very first all virtual Users Meeting last week. With more than 300 registered participants, the meeting set a new record. Plenary sessions, poster slam and poster session , workshops and after dinner session were all held online and hugely successful!

In the plenary session of the Users Meeting, CHESS Director Prof. Joel Brock looked back on an eventful year: CHESS resumed user operation in October 2019 after the CHESS Upgrade Project concluded, the partner funding model is fully implemented, the NSF-funded Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) between CHESS and the University of Puerto Rico is well on its way, and new projects are being developed. Although the CoVID-19 pandemic cut the experimental run short and limited many activities, 2019-2020 was a very busy, very productive, and very exciting year with tremendous advances in capabilities, capacity, and science at CHESS.

In June, CHESS resumed operation and e.g. COVID related research is conducted at the structural biology beamlines at this time.

The pandemic is expected to continue to impact the ability of users to travel to CHESS for experiments. Therefore, we have developed remote and mail-in capabilities at all CHESS beamlines for the fall 2020 experimental run. Important information about these capabilities can be found on the CHESS beamline websites that can be accessed from the Beamline Directory . CHESS is now accepting beamtime proposals and beamtime requests (BTR) for beamlines that are part of the Center for High Energy X-ray Sciences (CHEXS) at CHESS and MacCHESS for the September to November 2020 cycle. Details can be found here.

Overall, the CHESS Users Meeting this week reflected our unusual times: Although we were not able to do what we have done so well in the past, we found new ways to something remarkable!

Elke Arenholz
Associate Director, CHESS
Poster Session and Slam
We had more than 20 poster presenters participate in the poster slam and poster session. You can watch the entire Poster Slam here. Check out many of the posters here.
After Dinner Session
The first da y of the Users' Meeting featured a keynote talk from Prof. Rick Cerione, titled Drug Discovery At CHESS: How We Ended Up Studying COVID19. You can find the entire after dinner session, including Dr. Cerione's talk at the link below.
HEXT Workshop
This workshop on High Energy X-ray techniques (HEXT) gave students the knowledge and skills needed to plan, conduct, and interpret synchrotron experiments to answer questions specific to their research interests in material science. 
X-LEAP Workshop
This workshop was intended to develop the science case for a beamline dedicated to X-ray imaging for Life sciences, Environmental sciences, the Arts and Plant sciences (X-LEAP).
Characterizing Nanosecond Dynamics with X rays Workshop
This workshop provided the opportunity for the CHESS community to make the scientific case for a dedicated beamline optimized for the study of nanosecond dynamics at CHESS.
Poster/Paper Awards
At the CHESS Users' Meeting, we recognized the best student paper and outstanding poster presentations based on research performed at CHESS during the past year. Click through for more about the winners.
Users' Executive Committee Winners
Lymari Fuentes-Claudio and Catherine Royer are the newly-elected members of the Users' Executive Committee. Congratulations! The full list of committee members can be found here.
Issue No. 73 • 2020.6.16
CHESS
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