The Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley Lab: Beamline Science, Design and Control

Dr. Corie Ralston
Head, Berkeley Center for Structural Biology/Scientist Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CA

Cerent Engineering Science Complex, Salazar Hall 2009A
4:00 PM

Abstract - The Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Beamline Science, Design, and Control The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a national user facility designed to produce extremely bright X-Ray beams. Currently, there are over forty X-ray beamlines available at the ALS, all operating simultaneously but designed for different types of experiments in a wide range of fields, from discovery of new superconductors to characterizing protein structure. Chemists, physicists, and biologists from around the world apply for time at the ALS, and conduct experiments either onsite or remotely. The design and control of these beamlines requires a team of engineers and scientists, and typically is achieved through LabView and EPICS interfaces to motors, mirrors, and other specialized hardware. In this talk, I will cover the range of experiments conducted at the ALS, the types of software and hardware control used, and the exciting science that is enabled by the facility.

Dr. Corie Ralston has a bachelors in Physics and a doctorate in Biophysics. She completed a post-doctorate at Brookhaven National Laboratory in synchrotron techniques to study RNA structure, and is now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she started as a beamline scientist in 2002. Since 2012 she has been head of the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology, which runs five macromolecular crystallography X-Ray beamlines, and develops new synchrotron techniques at the Advanced Light Source.