SSRLUO 2013-2014 Executive Committee Members

Jordi Cabana
University of Illinois at Chicago, IL 60607
Jordi Cabana recently joined the University of Illinois in 2013. Prior to that time, Jordi was a Research Scientist at LBNL. He moved to the US in 2005 to join Prof. Clare P. Grey’s group at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, after completing his Ph.D. in Materials Science at the Institute for Materials Science of Barcelona in Spain in 2004. Jordi's research work focuses on the design and characterization of materials for electrochemical energy storage, with emphasis placed on the understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of reaction. He has extensively used long range (X-ray and neutron diffraction) and short range (X-ray absorption spectroscopy, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) characterization techniques, both in situ and ex situ, to probe crystal and electronic structure features of a variety of materials. He has performed some of these experiments at SSRL, ALS and NSLS. More recently, Jordi has leveraged technical developments in nanoscale chemical imaging to investigate kinetic and thermodynamic factors that control redox phase transformations in single particle and their ensembles.
Stanford University, Stanford, CA  94025
Justin Chartron is a postdoctoral fellow working with Judith Frydman at Stanford University. His experience in protein crystallography began in 2001 as a high school intern with Dave Stout at The Scripps Research Institute where he crystallized several proteins whose structures were determined using data collected at SSRL. He continued working with Dave as an undergraduate at UC San Diego, and solved his first structure using anomalous scattering at BL9-2. He went to Caltech for graduate school fully intending to use the soon-to-be commissioned BL12-2. Working with Bil Clemons, he had the pleasure of watching the Molecular Observatory mature, and he has used its resources to determine numerous structures of proteins involved in membrane targeting. He complemented high resolution structures with small angle X-ray scattering data at BL4-2. In addition to SSRL, he uses ALS and APS. As a postdoc, he has initiated several structural projects in the Frydman group, which had not previously performed crystallography. He has trained several group members, and in recent months has used SSRL to determine structures of molecular machines involved in protein folding. His research focuses on the mechanisms discriminating alternative nascent protein fates.
Elyse Coletta
Stanford University, Dept. of Engineering, Stanford, CA 94305
Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Elyse completed her B.S. with a double major in Chemical Engineering and Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. Between 2007 and 2009 she worked on catalyst related projects at Exxon Mobil as an intern three different times. Her undergraduate research project involved synthesizing metallic nanoparticles. Currently she is a 4th year Ph.D. student in the Chemical Engineering Department at Stanford University. Her graduate research involves synthesizing and characterizing materials for fuel cell membrane applications, and she is currently funded by a NDSEG fellowship.
Serena DeBeer (Past Chair)
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 / Max Planck Society, Germany
Serena DeBeer recently joined the Max Planck Institute für Bioanorganische Chemie, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. Prior to that time, She was an Assistant Professor in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department at Cornell University. She holds a B.S. from Southwestern University, a Ph.D. from Stanford University, and she worked for several years as a staff scientist at SSRL. Her research focuses on the development and application of synchrotron spectroscopies to understand fundamental questions in biological and chemical catalysis.
Lisa Dunn (SSRL Liason, Ex Officio)
SSRL, User Research Administration, 2575 Sand Hill Rd., Menlo Park, CA 94025
Lisa has worked at SSRL since 1986. She has managed the administration of protein crystallography proposals and experiments since 2000. Lisa earned her Bachelor of Science degree from San Jose State University.
Paul Evans
University of Wisconsin, Materials Science and Engineering, Madison, WI 53706
Paul Evans's research group focuses on the development and application of microscopy and scattering techniques to physical problems associated with emerging electronic materials, including complex oxide ferroeletrics and multiferroics as well as organic and inorganic semiconductor interfaces. Particular areas of interest with respect to x-ray science are in time-resolved and ultrafast probes and the incorporation of ultrafast time resolution into scattering techniques yielding nanometer-scale spatial resolution. Evans received PhD and SM degrees from Harvard University (Applied Physics), a BS degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell Univeristy, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Bell Labs.
Colleen Hansel (SSRL UEC Chair)
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dept. of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole, MA 02543-1050
Colleen is an Associate Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and was previously an Associate Professor at Harvard University. The foundation of her research is metal biogeochemistry and microbe-mineral interactions. Colleen conducted her graduate work at Stanford University with Scott Fendorf exploring microbial mediated Fe mineral transformations. She continued her research at Stanford as a postdoc, where she identified novel mechanisms of microbial Mn(II) oxidation and Mn oxide formation. Currently, Colleen’s research group continues to explore the mechanisms of microbially mediated metal (e.g., Fe, Mn, Hg) cycling and mineralization and the subsequent impact of those transformations on the ecology and health of microbial populations. Colleen has been a user at SSRL since 1998 and has also conducted research at ALS and APS.
Sarah Hayes (SSRL UEC Past Chair)
University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AL 99775
Sarah Hayes is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry. Prior to this position, she was a Mendenhall postdoctoral fellow at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park. She performed her Ph.D. research at the University of Arizona with Dr. Jon Chorover on the speciation of toxic metals in arid mine tailings. She gave a talk on the applications of microprobe spectroscopy to environmental scienceAt the 2009 SSRL user meeting. Her current work at the USGS with Andrea Foster and Laurie Balistrieri involves studying the sorption mechanism of tellurium (used in solar panel manufacture) to iron oxides and tellurium speciation in various geomedia. Her current research interests are focused on understanding the link between toxic metal speciation in geomedia and their associated risks to human and ecosystem health.
Chris Kim (Ex officio SNUG)
Chapman University, Physical Sciences, One University Ave., Orange, CA 92866
Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Sciences at Chapman University in Southern California. He conducted his graduate work at Stanford University under Gordon Brown and continued his research as a post-doc at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Glenn Waychunas. He has been a user at SSRL since 1996 and has also conducted research at the ALS and APS. Currently, he is studying trends in the speciation, concentration, and distribution of heavy metals in mine wastes as well as the mechanisms and extent of metal uptake and (co-)precipitation with iron oxyhydroxide nanoparticles. Chris is also involved in increasing opportunities for undergraduate students to conduct research at national synchrotron facilities.
Cathy Knotts (SSRL/LCLS Liaison, Ex Officio)
SSRL, User Research Administration, 2575 Sand Hill Rd., Menlo Park, CA 94025
Cathy has managed  SSRL User Research Administration since November 2000, taking on the additonal responsibilities for establishing and managing a joint SSRL/LCLS User Office in 2009 when LCLS began operations with the first user assisted commissioning experiments. Before joining SLAC, Cathy managed administrative operations and corporate communications in the biotechnology industry (1994-2000). Prior to moving to California to help start a biotech company, she was a management analyst for National Institute on Aging/National Institutes of Health in Maryland. Cathy graduated from the University of Maryland majoring in Health Science and Policy.
Stosh Kozimor
Los Alamos National Laboratory, C-NR, Los Alamos, NM 87545
Stosh Kozimor is a staff member at LANL. He conducted his graduate research with Professor William J. Evans at the University of California, Irvine in inorganic and organometallic synthesis, and his work was recognized in 2005 by the UCI Department of Chemistry Joan Rowland Award for meritorious performance in graduate studies. In the same year, he was offered a Director's Fellowship from LANL to continue his studies in actinide science. However he deferred, and accepted a position at the University of California with Professor Jeffrey R. Long to study magnetic exchange between actinides and transition metals. During this time he was awarded a Distinguished Reines Postdoctoral Fellowship at LANL and presented an opportunity to work in a completely different field, using synchrotron-generated radiation to probe electronic structure. Currently his interests lie in research that involves energy and the environment through fields loosely defined by synthesis, electronic structure, and synchrotron spectroscopy.
University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, Oklahoma City, OK 73190
Blaine entered crystallography as a graduate student by working on problems in DNA structure with Dr. Shing Ho at Oregon State University. He switched to problems in protein structure as a post-doc with Dr. Brian Matthews at the University of Oregon. While a post-doc, he started using synchrotron radiation to collect atomic resolution data from proteins and made his first trip to SSRL in 1999 where he has been returning almost every year. He started a lab at the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center that is focused on structural studies of RNAs from the RNA editing system in the mitochondrion of trypanosomes. His lab has been involved in SAXS studies for the past three years and started to make regular trips to BL 4-2 in addition to the protein crystallography beam lines. http://structuralbiology.ou.edu/
Rodrigo Noriega
Stanford University, Applied Physics, Stanford, CA 94305
Rodrigo Noriega earned his BS in Engineering Physics from Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico (2006). He is currently a fifth year graduate student in the Applied Physics program at Stanford University working under the direction of Prof. Alberto Salleo. His research focuses on the characterization of dopants and defect states in zinc oxide nanostructures, as well as on the measurement and modeling of disorder in organic semiconductors.
Juana Rudati
Carl Zeiss Microscopy (formerly Xradia), Concord, CA 94520
Dr. Rudati is R&D Project Manager at Xradia where she concentrates on advancing the capabilities of high-resolution x-ray microscopes (30nm and beyond). She has also developed and used XRF/XRD instruments. As a postdoc, Dr. Rudati was stationed at SLAC. She frequents both SSRL and APS to perform experiments with and test improvements on x-ray microscopes. She joined this company in 2006.
Alberto Salleo
Stanford University, Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford, CA 94305
After obtaining a PhD in Materials Science from UC Berkeley in 2001, Alberto Salleo joined Xerox PARC as a post-doctoral fellow and was appointed Assistant Professor in Materials Science at Stanford University in 2005. He is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, two Xerox Performance Awards, the NSF Career Award, the 3M Untenured Faculty Award and the SPIE Early Career Award. His main area of research is the investigation of structure-property relationships in organic semiconductors with emphasis on the role of defects. In collaboration with M. Toney at SSRL his group has developed synchrotron-based x-ray diffraction techniques to measure quantitatively paracrystalline disorder and degree of texture and crystallinity in semiconducting polymers. These microstructure parameters are used to understand how disorder at different length-scales affects charge transport. His group has also used anomalous X-ray diffraction to study Al and GA doping of ZnO nanostructures.
Edward Snell
Hauptman Woodward Institute, Buffalo, NY
Eddie's background is X-ray crystallography, bio spectroscopy and small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), which are complementary techniques that are invaluable to furthering the structural and mechanistic information on the biological world.
Jessica Vey
California State University Northridge, Pharmacology, Northridge, CA 91330
Jessica Vey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at CSUN. She was trained as a protein crystallographer as a graduate student in Dr. Catherine Drennan¹s laboratory at MIT and as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Tina Iverson¹s laboratory at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She has been an SSRL user since 2002, and is now using protein crystallography, biochemistry and bioinformatics to characterize selected flavin-containing monooxygenases, with the long-term goal of rationally engineering enzymes to alter their substrate specificity.
Beth Wurzburg (Ex Officio NUFO)
LBNL, Joint Genome Institute, Berkeley, CA 94305 USA
Beth Wurzburg was a Research Associate at the LBNL Joint Genome Institute. Previously, Beth was a Research Associate in the laboratory of Prof. Ted Jardetzky. She trained as a protein biochemist (Don Wiley's laboratory) and as a crystallographer (Ted Jardetzky's laboratory), and she has been collecting data at synchrotrons since 1995. Her research interests include biophysical studies of proteins of the immune system and of human pathogens.

 

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