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, UK.

Congrats, beamline 8.2.1!

Simon in a tie! Must be review time for the ALS-U…

ALS is down for the month of July and the first week or so of August. We are taking the opportunity to do a bunch of preventative maintenance on our beamlines. Some of the items include:
– cleaning the Be window on 502 (may help to decrease scatter in images)
– replacing air lines
– flushing the 501/503 monochromators
– drying out and cleaning all cryojets
– drying out and replacing various parts on the 821 and 502 cryocoolers
– replacing power supplies on detector PCs
– replacing the 501 dewar insulation and lid interface
– replacing the 501/502/503 LN2 innerter valves (they have become leaky over the years)
– replacing detector chiller coolant and rebuilding of the vacuum pumps
– upgrade CentOS on all linux boxes

From July 2017 to May 2018, the BCSB received (and shipped back after beamtime) 758 dewars. Most of these were handled by Anthony. Wow!