2014 CHESS Users' Meeting and Workshop

Abstract

The international user base of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) gathered in Ithaca, NY, from June 10–11, 2014, for the annual CHESS Users' Meeting and affiliated workshops. This year drew a record crowd of 174 participants from diverse disciplines in academia and industry to celebrate the outstanding achievements of CHESS users over the past year and to discuss the ongoing upgrades of the facility and the new science that they will enable. As per tradition, the first day of the meeting was a plenary session, which began with a morning briefing from the CHESS directors on the state of the laboratory. This was followed by a series of invited talks in user science, with subject matter spanning the multidisciplinary spectrum of CHESS research, from virology to superconductivity to art conservation. These plenary sessions preceded a well-attended poster session and wine-and-cheese reception, where more than 50 user posters were up for discussion. The evening was capped off with a banquet dinner and after-dinner talk by Steven Strogatz, who shared anecdotes from his efforts at communicating mathematics to the general public via his column in the New York Times. On the second day, the meeting broke up into smaller workshops. This year, MacCHESS sponsored a workshop on “Recent Applications in BioSAXS and New Developments in Combining SAXS and NMR Data,” which was chaired by Alvin Acerbo, while the Insitμ effort at CHESS sponsored a workshop on “Structural Materials Opportunities for Combining Polycrystal Modeling and High Energy X-rays,” which was chaired by Matt Miller.