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August 2023 Message from the UEC

Contact: Inna Vishik, UEC Chair

woman wearing pink

The Users’ Executive Committee (UEC) is hard at work making final preparations for the ALS User Meeting, to be held September 11–15! This year, registration is free, but there is a hard registration deadline of September 1 to enable processing for site access. This User Meeting will be special for several reasons:

    1. Our first in-person meeting since 2019
    2. Visioning workshops (Days 3–5) to shape the post-ALS-U future of the facility
    3. 30 years since first light (with commemorative swag!)
    4. Our first User Meeting under new ALS Director Dimitri Argyriou. He has been meeting with various constituencies during his first month on the job, and this will be the first in-person meeting with the user community at large. As he emphasized to the UEC in our July meeting, we have our eyes on the prize—a brand new synchrotron and all the opportunities this enables. The UEC encourages the user community to share their ideas required to bring this tool to full utilization.

Toward that end, I want to thank the nearly 150 users and staff who attended the Dark Time Town Hall on July 20, organized by management with support from the UEC. This town hall discussed the opportunities provided by the ALS Upgrade, gave an overview of the dark time and dawn of first light, shared short-term and long-term beamline impacts, and discussed impacts on proposal calls. This was followed by a walkthrough of updated websites and a Q&A session. The recording and slides from that event are available, and updated ALS webpages can be found at https://als.lbl.gov/als-u/overview/. I encourage you to be on the lookout for more discussions and town halls related to the dark time in the future, and also use the posted information about timelines and beamtime impacts as a resource in planning your experiments and proposals.

Finally, for those of you heading to the User Meeting in-person, perhaps looking for a roommate or a place to nosh when UM catering is not available, check out the Beamtime Buddies Whatsapp group!

The UEC is available to help with the needs of the user community. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at alsuec@lbl.gov