The Pilatus 6M detector has arrived!

The BCSB is planning on starting a monthly User Forum to solicit feedback from users on the current and future use of the beamlines. We’d love to hear from you about the direction that the BCSB should be taking in terms of beamline upgrades, features, and general operations. If you are interested in participating in the forum, please contact Corie Ralston.

We are very pleased to now have Daniil Prigozhin in the BCSB. He comes to us with a strong background in crystallography, both growing crystals and solving structures. He completed his PhD work with Dr. Tom Alber at UC Berkeley in 2014, then did a post-doc with Dr. Yorgo Modis at the University of Cambridge,…

A special welcome to our SULI student, Sayan Roychowhury, who is majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois. He is here with us for the fall term, and writing code to process visual images of protein crystals and center them automatically in the x-ray beam. SULI is the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program in which the host lab (in this case, LBNL) pays for a student to work for a few months to gain experience at a national lab and to encourage students to remain in STEM fields.

Dectris was here at the ALS during the recent 2-bunch mode, and re-installed two of the modules on the Pilatus detector on beamline 5.0.2. Users may not have noticed, but the detector was previously missing panels on the far edges. These are now in good working order, and several test data sets have been collected…

The BCSB had its first User Forum meeting on Feb 5. We discussed the possibilities for the new b3 software interface, showed some screenshots of new the new interface, and gathered information from our users on what they wanted in the “new b3”. It was a very productive discussion! The next User Forum will be…

Several BCSB staff teamed up with other ALS beamline scientists to represent the ALS at this year’s American Crystallographic Association meeting in Denver. In the picture are from left to right: Christine Beavers, Simon Morton, Diane Bryant, Stacey Ortega, Jay Nix, Corie Ralston: