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
