The ALS was a major selling point when Whitney Loo chose where to pursue her PhD. Now that she runs her own research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is maintaining her ties and giving back to the ALS community by serving on the UEC.
What do you do for work?
I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at University Wisconsin-Madison, so I teach some classes and run a research group that is broadly focused on polymer physics. We use a lot of x-ray and neutron scattering and spectroscopy tools to look at polymer physical properties on the molecular level.
What prompted your interest in this field?
When I was deciding where I wanted to go for graduate school, I came to UC Berkeley, and they gave us a tour of the ALS. I just thought it was the coolest place on Earth. I identified a research group at UC Berkeley that worked closely with LBL and the ALS, and they were studying polymer physics. And so, I decided that that’s where I was going to do my PhD. I wanted to experience the national lab while I was a grad student. It turns out I really enjoyed not just working with the national lab but also the actual science that we were doing. I thought it was very interesting. And in this job, you get to pick what you think is cool and do it for the rest of your life!
Do you go to a lot of user facilities?
We mostly use the ALS for soft x-rays, and a little bit of NSLS-II. We have our own hard x-ray benchtop source. For neutron facilities, we’re using HFIR at Oak Ridge National Lab currently.
I’ve probably used eight or so different soft and hard x-ray beamlines at the ALS for spectroscopy, tomography, and scattering. There’s a lot of interesting complementary techniques that allow you to learn more about the systems you study, and being able to run those different experiments in one place is very unique.
What inspired you to join the Users’ Executive Committee (UEC)?
I “grew up” at LBL. I did my graduate work jointly between LBL and UC Berkeley in Nitash Balsara’s group. When I was a postdoc, my advisor at the University of Chicago, Paul Nealey, had an approved proposal at the Molecular Foundry and offered to let me stay in California. So, I stayed at the Molecular Foundry during my postdoc and did a lot of work at the ALS. When I was thinking about the transition to my independent job at Wisconsin, I worried about missing LBL and the ALS and losing a lot of my national lab connections. Getting the opportunity to serve on the UEC was a great way for me to maintain those networks and give back to a community that really helped shape me into the scientist that I am today. And serving as Chair is the ultimate way of giving back to the community.
The UEC is thinking about how to generate a more diverse user community—not just the same institutions or groups that have been doing experiments here for 20 years. I became a professor due to my experiences at the ALS as a graduate student. I got to work on equipment that costs more money than I could ever imagine, and they just let me learn how to use it and run it. That independence was really eye-opening and empowering, and I want all graduate students and all researchers to be able to have access.
What should users expect from the UEC?
The goal of the UEC is to improve the user experience—for current, long-time, first-time, and potential future users. That means making sure there is good communication about updates happening at the ALS, helpful resources on writing effective proposals, and maintaining an inclusive and welcoming environment so that all users feel comfortable asking for help.
This year, the UEC’s goal is to engage with our users about how to prepare for the changes on the horizon with the upcoming dark time that is associated with ALS-U, and still be excited by the new science and new capabilities that are going to be unlocked. While some of the disruptions, such as the increased shutdowns and the incoming dark time, are painful, the light that’s going to come after is going to be so novel and such a unique capability that it’ll be worth it.
What are you looking forward to after the dark time?
We’re really excited about the x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) capabilities. The new beamline will offer XPCS at softer x-ray energy, which will allow for tracking specific, unique chemistries through resonance. The preliminary work from some of the development beamlines seems really interesting—for us to track dynamics in these different ion-containing polymer systems with chemical specificity.
In your free time, what do you like to do?
I spend a lot of time outdoors cycling in the summer. Living in Wisconsin, in the winter, I ride the indoor bicycle. I’ve been brewing my own kombucha for eight years, and I love to cook, especially recreating a variety of foods that I used to eat in Berkeley. I really miss good sourdough, and I think my husband is coming around to the idea of me having more fermentable objects if I start making sourdough.