Recipients of the 2012 Users’ Executive Committee awards and Student Poster Competition were announced Tuesday, October 9, at the ALS User Meeting.
The David A. Shirley Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement at the ALS went to, from left, Carl Percival (University of Manchester), Dudley Shallcross [(University of Bristol) not pictured], and Craig Taatjes and David Osborn (Sandia), for making the first direct measurements of the reactions of Criegee intermediates, and showing that their impact on tropospheric chemistry and climate may be substantially greater than previously assumed. The research team conducted studies of gas phase Criegee intermediates using a multiplexed photoionization mass spectrometer (MPIMS) at the ALS. Percival explained in a presentation of the research on Tuesday morning that “scientists have always postulated that Criegee intermediates play a major role, but this was the first direct measurement of rates of reaction and product yields.”
David Shirley was a Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and Director of LBNL from 1980 to 1989, and was instrumental in having the Advanced Light Source built. He is now retired from the lab.
The Klaus Halbach Award for Innovative Instrumentation at the ALS recognized from left, Jeff Dickert and Simon Morton of Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division for the invention and implementation of the Compact Variable Collimator (CVC), which has led to a dramatic increase in productivity of protein crystallography at the ALS Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BCSB) beamlines. The CVC has already been used to make critical discoveries in areas that include Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, antibiotic resistance and food crop improvements.
Klaus Halbach was a senior staff scientist at LBNL who pioneered the development of undulators using permanent magnets, and other innovations in accelerator physics. Even though he retired from LBNL in 1991, he remained active in lab projects and student training until his death in 2000.
The Tim Renner User Services Award for Outstanding Support to the ALS User Community was awarded to Tolek Tyliszczak, beamline scientist at the ALS Molecular Environmental Sciences (MES) beamline, a leading national resource in the field of soft x-ray synchrotron radiation research. Tyliszczak was recognized for his “outstanding generosity in spirit as well as remarkable technical support, which has provided countless scientists the ability to push their science forward at the Advanced Light Source.”
Tim Renner was a beamline scientist at the ALS who died at an early age, and who during his career touched everyone that knew him with his caring attitude to others and his larger-than-life personality. This award recognizes the services of others across the ALS organization who, like Tim, have made outstanding contributions to the ALS User Community.
The ALS Student Poster Competition is a fun ALS User Meeting tradition that gives recognition to significant student research conducted at the ALS. Twenty-one students from universities across the nation and throughout the world created posters about their work for this year’s event and all were given a brief opportunity to speak about their research. First prize went to, from right, Mahati Chintapalli of the Materials Science Division at UC Berkeley, who presented her research paper, “Size-Dependent Dissociation of CO on Cobalt Nanocatalysts,” in a presentation to the ALS user community on Tuesday morning. Second prize was awarded to UC Berkeley’s Christine Koh for her poster titled “Kinetic Measurements of Intermediates Formed by Hypergolic Reaction of Ionic Liquid and Nitric Acid,” and third prize to UC Berkeley’s James Wonsever for his poster, “ShirleyXAS: An Online Approach to NEXAFS Spectra.”