26 December 2021 ESRFnews

Online ESRF User Meeting 7 9 February 2022 The programme of the latest User Meeting will give users the opportunity to interact with ESRF scientists and to present the results of their research at the ESRF. It will tackle broad topics such as climate change, gender equality and COVID-19 vaccines, as well as highlighting more specific user research activities and updating the community on the status of ESRF beamlines. The meeting will be the perfect occasion to discover the most recent experimental results from the ESRF EBS and to define new experimental approaches following the upgrades and improvements enabled by the new source. As well as the usual tutorials, plenaries, director reports, posters and Young Scientist award, there will be three user-dedicated microsymposia: New opportunities for high-pressure science at the ESRF EBS; Ligand and fragment screening in drug design: enabling technologies for pressing threats; and Perspectives in materials science and engineering: towards a digital and sustainable future.

Sixth workshop on energy for sustainable science at research infrastructures (ESSRI 2022) 17 18 March 2022 Dwindling resources together with rising energy costs and climate change are all challenges faced by the next generation of large-scale research infrastructures. Sustainable developments will rely on mid- and long-term strategies for reliable, affordable and carbon-neutral energy supplies. Hosted this year by the ESRF, in collaboration with five other European research infrastructures, ESSRI 2022 will bring together international sustainability experts, stakeholders and representatives from research facilities worldwide to identify the challenges, best practices and policies to develop and implement sustainable solutions at research infrastructures. The main themes are: Energy management at research infrastructures and resulting experience; Sustainability of equipment, materials and resources; Energy-efficient technologies; and Energy-efficient technology research.

EMBO practical course: Characterisation of macromolecular complexes by integrative structural biology 28 May 4 June 2022 Lectures and practical sessions will explain the techniques used to produce, purify, reconstitute and characterise multi-subunit protein and protein/nucleic acid complexes for structural analysis. Specifically, the course will cover multi- subunit protein expression in bacteria, insect and mammalian cells; production, folding and purification of non-coding RNAs; affinity, electrophoretic and centrifugation methods to isolate and purify sub-complexes and holocomplexes; biochemical and biophysical experiments that inform on the stoichiometric and conformational homogeneity of complexes; and strategies for determining the overall 3D architecture of large macromolecular assemblies and ultimately their structure at atomic or near-atomic resolution. Registration deadline: 31 January 2022.

EVENTS

MOVERS & SHAKERS

Trevor Forsyth has been appointed director of the Lund Institute of advanced Neutron and X-ray Science (LINXS) in Sweden. Dedicated to becoming

a nucleus for national and international scientific activities in Science Village Scandinavia between the MAX IV synchrotron and the forthcoming European Spallation Source (ESS) in Sweden, LINXS is developing a national competence centre, a research networking hub and a think tank for the education of future generations of neutron-source and synchrotron users. Previously, Forsyth was head of life sciences at the Institut Laue-Langevin and science board member of the Partnership for Structural Biology on the EPN campus, as well as an ESRF user. His research interests have included structural studies of DNA, DNA- drug interactions, DNA-protein complexes, and self-assembling systems of synthetic and biological origin. Sweden is well placed to make important headway in terms of enabling breakthrough science, he says.

Helmut Schober has been appointed director-general of the forthcoming European Spallation Source (ESS) in Sweden. Previously director of the Institut Laue-Langevin

on the EPN campus, Schober was also founding chair of the League of advanced European Neutron Sources, of which ESS is a member, and a former member of the ESS scientific advisory committee. As a physicist, he has previously worked at the University of Mainz and at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany on the spectroscopy of functional materials, from nanostructures to liquids and glasses. He joins the ESS at a critical time for the project, when construction is ending and the installation of technical equipment and commissioning is being intensified. During the summer, ESS technical staff completed the conditioning of a radio-frequency quadrupole the component of the ESS linear accelerator that focuses, bunches and accelerates a stream of charged particles as they move down the accelerator towards the ESS target.

Laurent Chapon has been appointed associate laboratory director for photon sciences and director of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne

National Laboratory in Illinois, US. Chapon joins Argonne from Diamond Light Source in the UK, where he has been the director of physical sciences since 2016. In this capacity he led the scientific strategy and oversaw five of Diamond s eight science groups, which encompass 22 X-ray beamlines and two electron microscopes. He led groups dedicated to technological advancements in optics, metrology and detectors technology at the facility, and oversaw the project office, user office, and experiment hall groups. As part of Argonne s senior management team, Chapon will lead the APS through a time of extraordinary change, with an APS upgrade project that will result in X-ray beams up to 500 times brighter than those that the synchrotron currently delivers. This will require a year-long shutdown of the APS, currently scheduled to begin in April 2023.