Saturday's Annual Users' Meeting participants were welcomed by Michele Loewen, 2005 Chair of the CLS Users’ Advisory Committee, who introduced CLS Executive Director William Thomlinson. Dr. Thomlinson addressed the facility’s many achievements and challenges as the CLS grows towards full user operations. CLS Director of Operations Mark de Jong provided an update on the machine state of the CLS. Attendees then had an opportunity to hear their first report from Thomas Ellis who joined the CLS as Director of Research in March. Dr. Ellis began by highlighting a long list of firsts since the last meeting, including first light in all seven Phase I beamlines and the start of user programs with the first original experiments.

The status reports were followed by thematic sessions on synchrotron environmental applications, imaging and materials science.

Paul Dumas from SOLEIL discussed the exciting new opportunities that are being realized with infrared emission, including terahertz experiments and imaging, with particular applications to the life sciences and the cosmetics industry.

Rob Lewis of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia presented his group’s work in imaging the lungs of fetal and new born marsupials using phase-contrast techniques. The method permitted the capture of what happens in the lungs of newborns during their very first breath—important for improving the understanding of lung development and respiratory complications in pre-term infants.

Tom Irving (Illinois Institute of Technology, APS) bemused the audience with his studies involving time-resolved x-ray diffraction of fruit flies in flight. This is a considerable challenge, considering the time scale of a fruit fly’s wing beat (in the region of a millisecond) and the size of the muscles involved (between five and fifty nanometers). The similarities between the structure of fruit flies’ flight muscles and human heart muscle means that the understanding of how the insect’s muscle works at the molecular level could lead to improved treatments for heart disease.

Other presenters included Johannes Lehman (Cornell University), Derek Peak (University of Saskatchewan), Brian Mark (University of Manitoba), Elisabeth Schultke (University of Saskatchewan), Mark Sutton (McGill University) and John Tse (University of Saskatchewan).
At the end of the formal AUM program there was a wine & cheese and poster reception where a record number of scientific posters were displayed. The reception was followed by the AUM banquet where participants could relax after a busy few days. The Canadian Institute of Synchrotron Radiation Prize for the best student poster was awarded to Janay McNaughton, a graduate student from the University of Saskatchewan for her poster entitled “Electronic Structure of Boron Nitride Single Crystals and Films”. As participants finished their desserts historian Ken Coates, Adjunct Professor of Political Studies, University of Saskatchewan, related the history of the development of the CLS against the broader canvas of past voyages of exploration.