Our second all virtual Users' Meeting was last week. With over 180 registered participants, the meeting was a huge success. Plenary sessions, poster slam and poster session, and workshops were all held online and hugely engaging!

Science talks were presented by our two student paper prize award winners. Sven Gustafson of Purdue University discussed his paper Quantifying microscale drivers for fatigue failure via coupled synchrotron X-ray characterization and simulations where his research work thus far has been on structural aerospace alloys, primarily those which function in the hot sections of gas turbine engines, with data collected at both CHESS and ESRF. 

Jacob Combs of the University of Florida discussed his paper Inhibition of Carbonic Anhydrase Using SLC-149: Support for a Noncatalytic Function of CAIX in Breast Cancer, where his research predominately focuses on utilizing X-ray crystallography to study a protein of interest, carbonic anhydrase, to develop novel inhibitors using structure guided rational drug design

We are excited to announce two new members of the Users’ Executive Committee, Rachel Lim and William Thomas. Both members will work with other representatives of the UEC to help cultivate the user experience at CHESS. As always, you can reach our UEC through our website for any comments or questions.

As we look towards the future, we are excited to continue the CHESS 2030 Workshop series. Coming up next week is the workshop on AI-driven autonomy to accelerate X-ray experiment-based discovery.   This interdisciplinary workshop will focus on identifying the fundamental questions related to artificial-intelligence-driven autonomy in combination X-ray based characterization techniques. There is still time to register for this workshop as well as any of the other upcoming events in the series.

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 2021 cycle. Details can be found here.

Joel Brock, Director, CHESS (email Joel)

Last week, we hosted our all virtual 2021 Users' Meeting. With over 180 registered participants, the meeting was a huge success.

The morning featured updates from CHESS Director Joel Brock, an accelerator update from CESR Operator Jim Shanks, and updates from each of the directors of CHEXS, MSN-C, and MacCHESS. After lunch, Technical Director Ernie Fontes updated us on the status and future of our hew High Magnetic Field beamline project. Throughout the day we were also treated to talks by each of the student research prize winners, a fast-paced Poster Slam, and a poster session in the interactive platform Spatial.Chat. As is tradition, we also hosted a High-Energy X-ray Techniques workshop the two days following the Users' Meeting, with the goal of fostering a new generation of x-ray researchers! Thanks to everyone who joined us!