26 December 2022 ESRFnews

ESRF User Meeting 6 8 Feb 2023 Users are welcome back on-site for the next ESRF User Meeting (unless the evolving global-health situation dictates otherwise). Given the popularity of the past two online meetings, with participation from students the world over, the plenary of this meeting will be presented in hybrid mode that is, accessible in-person and virtually. We therefore expect to combine the usual discussions around posters and the direct interactions with ESRF scientists and users with a greater global reach, enabling the promotion of the EBS s high impact forefront applications. As usual, the programme of the 2023 User Meeting

includes tutorials on the first day, a plenary session with keynotes and the directors science and facility reports on the second day, as well as three user-dedicated microsymposia on the last day. https://www.esrf.fr/UM2023

In situ structural biology: from cryo-EM to multi-scale modelling 8 11 Feb 2023 There is an increasing awareness that mechanistic structural information on molecular machines is ideally generated within the context of intact cells in order to fully grasp how they function in a complex native environment. Recent technological advances have nurtured

the development of such in situ structural biology approaches in several disciplines, including cryo-EM, mass spectrometry, super-resolution microscopy, NMR, computational modelling and others. Held at EMBL Heidelberg in Germany, but accessible virtually, this conference will bring together experts and early-stage researchers from the separate fields to provide a platform for structural biology within the cellular context; to stimulate discussions about how to integrate data from different methods; and to define what types of biological questions can already be addressed using in situ structural biology and which might be approached in the future. https://tinyurl.com/EMBLinsitu

EVENTS

MOVERS & SHAKERS

Claudine Dargent is the new director of administration at the ESRF. Dargent spent the first 9 years of her career at the international audit firm KPMG with various

responsibilities in the management of audit teams, before working for 10 years in private- services companies, including the positions of chief financial officer and managing director. After receiving her executive Master s in business administration at the Lyon Ecole de Management in France, she joined Lyon Catholic University as secretary-general; then, as member of the steering committee, she helped boost the number of students, the breadth of university research and the campus size. She joined the ESRF on 1 September.

Kristina Djinović-Carugo is the new head of EMBL Grenoble, following the retirement of Steven Cusack in June. Awarded a PhD in chemistry at the University

of Ljubljana in Slovenia in 1992, Djinović- Carugo took up a postdoctoral position at the University of Pavia in Italy and at EMBL Heidelberg in Germany, before becoming head of the structural biology laboratory at the Elettra synchrotron in Trieste, Italy, in 1999. Five years later she became full professor of molecular structural biology at University of Vienna in Austria, while in 2009 she took up the chair of the university s department of structural and computational biology, at the Max Perutz Labs.

Chia-Hung Hsu is the new director of the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre (NSRRC) in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Hsu received her PhD in physics

from Boston University in the US on surface science and thin-film X-ray scattering. After completing her postdoctoral research nearby at Harvard University 1993, she joined the NSRRC, and was proactive in building the first X-ray beamline in Taiwan and at the facility s Taiwan beamlines at SPring-8 synchrotron in Japan. She has been head of the scientific research division and chief secretary at NSRRC, as well as a review panel member for physics at Taiwan s National Science and Technology Council.

Stephen Streiffer is the new vice president of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, California. Streiffer comes to SLAC and Stanford

University which has a contract with the US Department of Energy to operate SLAC after 24 years at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, US, where he performed research at the lab s Advanced Photon Source (APS); he then directed APS for eight years and most recently served as chief research officer and deputy lab director for science and technology. One of the great things about working at a national lab, in my view, is that everybody is working on the [same] scientific mission, he said in a recent interview.

Ulrich Bonse, a pioneer of X-ray science, died on 11 October. A long-time user at DESY on the German accelerator lab s erstwhile DORIS ring,

Bonse was among the three first ESRF users, making groundbreaking attempts in X-ray tomography made possible by European Synchrotron s novel undulator X-ray radiation at the ID06 beamline in 1992. He worked in collaboration with the ESRF Optics Group, headed at the time by Andreas Freund, while training a number of PhD students, among them the ESRF s Michael Krisch. With his deep knowledge of X-ray theory, Bonse proposed many technical developments based on the use of perfect silicon crystals, including X-ray interferometry, ultra-high-energy resolution X-ray monochromators and manipulation of X-ray phase space, which are still crucial to the exploitation of hard X-ray synchrotron sources. Meanwhile, X-ray tomography, more advanced and boosted by the ESRF EBS, is allowing users to push the frontiers of science in areas such as medical imaging, palaeontology and materials science. We are going to deeply miss him, and

we thank him for his dedication to the advancement of science and his inspiration to generations of X-ray scientists, said the ESRF director-general Francesco Sette. Our thoughts go to his family in these difficult moments, marked by the loss of such an exceptional scientist.