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Ringleaders & Postdocs

Senior Scientist Musa Ahmed

In his 19 years at the ALS, senior scientist Musa Ahmed has seen chemistry grow from a somewhat obscure synchrotron science focus area to a cornerstone, award-winning ALS program. Ahmed was recently charged with leading the chemical sciences program for both ALS chemical dynamics beamlines, 9.0.1 and 11.0.2, which befits his long-standing enthusiasm and leadership in advancing chemistry research at the ALS. Read more »

Greta Toncheva and Robert Fairchild, Laser Safety Officers

“Safety is elemental” is the latest safety tagline for the ALS and Berkeley Lab, and it also pretty much sums up the mission of laser safety officers Greta Toncheva and Robert Fairchild. Toncheva and Fairchild share the responsibility of ensuring laser safety lab-wide, with Toncheva responsible for overseeing laser safety operations at the ALS. Read more »

Ring Leader: Elke Arenholz, Senior Scientist, Scientific Support Group

Senior scientist Elke Arenholz has seen a lot of changes at Beamlines 4.0.2 and 6.3.1 since she arrived at the ALS in 2000, but what brought her here initially is still what keeps her passionate about her work–designing new instrumentation and working with the user community to optimize research capabilities. Read more »

Roger Falcone, Director’s Address

I welcome all members of the ALS community back for a new year. We had a fine 2011 that included an excellent review by the Department of Energy as well as the launching of a number of new activities. We are starting 2012 with the promise of healthy funding for both user operations and machineRead More Read more »

Peter Denes, Head, Photon Sciences Initiative

I joined the ALS family in 2007, filling the newly created position of ALS Division Deputy for Engineering. Because a large percentage of ALS staff are part of the Engineering Division, this position was created to establish shared management in the two divisions to ensure better integration and coordination between engineering and non-engineering ALS staff.Read More Read more »

Christoph Steier, Accelerator Operations and Development

The operational performance of the ALS has improved continuously after overcoming the challenges presented by the injector upgrade to enable top-off operations in 2007. In the last six months, reliability, mean-time-between-failures and mean-time-to-recovery have reached levels never before achieved at the ALS (see this month’s article “Twelve Superlative User Weeks at the ALS”). This includesRead More Read more »

Paul Adams, ALS Division Deputy for Biosciences

In my new role as ALS Division Deputy for Biosciences I am working with bioscience researchers at the ALS to develop an integrated strategic plan. Lab Director Paul Alivisatos, Physical Biosciences and Life Sciences Division Directors, and ALS leadership identified this activity as important for the future of Lab biosciences, and for making a caseRead More Read more »

Elizabeth Moxon, ALS Communications Group Leader

How do you explain how a synchrotron works to a fidgety five-year-old and her tired parents? Well, you turn her into an electron, hand her a ping-pong ball “photon” and send her careening around a synchrotron obstacle course that has been painted in brilliant colors on the ALS parking lot. After she “accelerates” down aRead More Read more »

Ben Feinberg, Interim Deputy Director for Science

Although officially retired, in May I agreed to help the ALS part-time in light of Bob Schoenlein’s new role helping to plan for a next generation light source at Berkeley Lab. As the ALS Interim Deputy Director for Science, I now have the opportunity to work with a different part of the ALS organization thanRead More Read more »