Research at HZB facilities - packed in three days
Prize winners Dr. Karine dos Santos (left) and Dr. Katharina Diller together with Prof. Mathias Richter of the Friends of HZB. © M. Setzpfand/HZB
Prof. Mikael Eriksson, winner of the “Innovation Award on Synchrotron Radiation 2013” (middle) together with Prof. Wolfgang Gudat of the Friends of HZB (right) and award presenter Prof. Andreas Jankowiak (left). © M. Setzpfand/HZB
500 scientists gathered and shared information at the HZB User Meeting from 4 to 6 December 2013
At this year’s User Meeting, around 500 researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin got together to report on their latest results. At the fifth joint meeting at the beginning of December, thirty-three speakers gave lectures, representing an impressive range of topics that the researchers at the two large facilities BER II and BESSY II have explored over the past year.
Young Scientist Sessions
A special highlight was the newly introduced Young Scientist Sessions for Research with Photons and Neurons. “The lectures given by the junior researchers were outstanding. We greatly enjoyed listening to and meeting young people who are highly motivated and so enthusiastic about research,” recounts Antje Vollmer from User Coordination, who organized the event together with her colleagues. And accordingly, this item is already set on next year’s programme.
The User Meeting featured two poster sessions, with more than 240 posters at the two locations. The award for the best poster, a book voucher worth 200 euros, went to Hendrik Vita. He illustrated his experiments on the electronic structure of graphene (title of the poster: “Electronic structure of graphene on pseudomorphic Cu/Ir(100))”.
Friends’ Awards
Another highlight was the prize giving ceremony for the “Friends of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin e.V” awards. Two young researchers received the Ernst-Eckhard-Koch Prize for their doctoral theses: Dr. Katharina Diller, TU München, studied for her doctorate the way various organic pigment molecules (porphyrins) behave when adsorbed onto metallic surfaces. For this, she combined measurements at BESSY II with computer simulations and gained new insights of great interest for, among other things, the design of organic solar cells and organic components. Dr. Karine Fernanda dos Santos, Freie Universität Berlin, received the prize for her doctoral thesis on the structure of components of the spliceosome. Many human hereditary diseases are caused by malfunctions of the spliceosome. Karine dos Santos’ work has helped explain hitherto unknown control mechanisms of the spliceosome, the failure of which leads to degeneration of the retina of the human eye and potentially blindness. The MX beamlines at BESSY II were central to her experiments. The Ernst-Eckhard-Koch Prize commemorates the early scientific director of the synchrotron radiation source BESSY I and this year was worth 2000 euros.
The Friends of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin gave this year’s Innovation Award on Synchrotron Radiation to Prof. Dr. Mikael Erikson, who is managing the construction of the new synchrotron source MAX IV in Lund, Sweden. The award is worth 3000 euros and is supported by the Berlin companies SPECS GmbH and BESTEC GmbH. Erikson received the award for his contributions to the development of new technologies for the next generation of storage rings at the limit of diffraction, which are now employed at MAX IV (title: “Realizing the concept and developing the technology of the multi-bend achromat storage ring towards diffraction limited synchrotron light source”. These developments are also being adopted already in the upgrade programmes of other synchrotron radiation sources such as APS, SIRIUS, ESRF or SPRING 8.
Large Industry Exhibition
There was also great interest in the exhibition of around 50 companies that presented themselves and advertised for cooperative projects at the User Meeting. This provided the funds for the traditional Berlin Buffet, the social highlight of the User Meeting in the BESSY foyer. Participants also discussed the possibilities of cooperation with industry at a satellite workshop. Yet another workshop was held in the Protein Crystallography department, which celebrated its 1000th protein structure decrypted at BESSY II this year.
Not only the organizers were pleased with the turnout of the User Meeting; the users themselves expressed themselves in a survey as very happy with the programme and the offerings of the User Meeting. The survey, answered by more than 200 users on various aspects of user service, is still being analyzed in detail.