The Canadian Light Source will host its first X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) School for materials sciences this summer, from August 16-18. The school will be in-person and will have lectures, hands-on experiments at the beamlines and hands-on sessions for XRD analysis and Pair Distribution Function (PDF) data analysis.

The school will cover several topics: X-Ray Diffraction, Rietveld Refinement, Pair Distribution Function, Reverse Monte Carlo fitting, Small Angle X-Ray Scattering and in-situ experiments.

We look to equip our present and future users with the knowledge and tools that they will use during their research. This school is primarily aimed at students and early career researchers from academia and industry, with an interest in XRD, SAXS, and PDF.

Applications are now closed. 

Participants selected for the workshop will be contacted and informed of the procedure of payment in July 2022. Payment must be received prior to the school.

• Academic participants: $400
• Non-academic participants: $600

Included in the registration fee is access to the full academic programme and hands-on sessions, in addition to coffee, snacks, and lunch each day of the school. Participants will be expected to arrange their own accommodations in Saskatoon. 

There are limited funds available to support academic participants. Please indicate on your application form if you would like to be considered for this support.

Larry Calvert Travel Support

Students are eligible to apply for financial support from the Larry Calvert Travel Fund, administered by the Canadian National Committee for Crystallography (CNCC)

The deadline to apply for this support is June 30, 2022.

• More Information

Note that this is a tentative schedule only, and is subject to change. All times listed are in local Saskatoon (CST) time.

The Canadian Light Source XRD summer school will take place at the University of Saskatchewan Campus, with all the locations being within 5-10 minutes walking distance.

Robert Von Dreele

Bob has influenced generations of XRD enthusiasts around the world with his program GSAS II, a free, friendly, and well documented software to perform a myriad of XRD data reduction and analysis including Rietveld refinement. Throughout his prolific career, Bob worked at J.S. Anderson’s lab at Oxford, Arizona State University, the Los Alamos LANSCE and Argonne IPNS spallation neutron sources, and recently retired as a Senior Physicist at Argonne National Laboratory. He was President of the American Crystallographic Association and Recipient of the ACA Trueblood Award as well as the ICDD Barrett and Hanawalt Awards; he is a Fellow of both the Mineralogical Society of America and the ACA.

Feizhou He

Materials & Chemical Sciences Manager at the Canadian Light Source

Feizhou got his B.Eng. degree in Materials Science from Tsinghua University in China, and finished his PhD in Physics at University of Connecticut, USA. He was a frequent user of the NSLS, before joined Canadian Light Source as a staff scientist in 2005. He designed and commissioned the Resonant Elastic and Inelastic X-ray Scattering (REIXS) beamline at the CLS. His research interests include quantum materials, epitaxial thin films, strain engineering in heterostructures.

Joel Reid

Industrial Scientist at the Canadian Light Source

Joel Reid is a Senior Industrial Scientist at the CLS, specializing in powder diffraction for the Industry Services group. Prior to joining the CLS in 2011, Joel held a position as Senior Scientific Editor at the International Centre for Diffraction Data (Newtown Square, PA), and as a research scientist working on biomaterials for bone replacement at Millenium Biologix (Kingston, ON). An engineering physicist by training, he completed his undergraduate and PhD in engineering physics at Queen’s University in Kingston. His work with clients and collaborators often involves identification and quantification of complex, multiphase mixtures and the solving of new structures with powder diffraction.

Graham King

Scientist at the Brockhouse High Energy Wiggler Beamline at the Canadian Light Source

Graham received his B.S. in Chemistry from SUNY Buffalo and his Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from The Ohio State University working with Patrick Woodward. He then did a post-doc at the Lujan Neutron Scattering Center at Los Alamos National Lab followed by several years as a staff scientist. He came to the Canadian Light Source as a Brockhouse Scientist in 2018. His research is focused on advancing structural analysis using advanced powder diffraction methods. This includes Rietveld refinements, ab-initio structural solution of extended and molecular solids, and local structure analysis using the pair distribution function. He is an advocate for probing the structure of a material over several length scales in order to obtain a complete structural understanding.

Beatriz Moreno

Senior Scientist at the Canadian Light Source - Brockhouse Beamlines' Responsible

Beatriz got her B.S and Masters degrees in Havana, Cuba. She finished her Ph.D and post-doc in the National Institute for Space Research in Sao Paulo, Brazil. During this time, she was a frequent user of the Brazilian Light Source diffraction beamlines, where she then worked as a staff scientist. In 2012 she started working at the Canadian Light Source, in the Brockhouse project. Her research interests include applying a variety of synchrotron techniques to solve structural problems in thin films, multilayers, quantum dots, magnetic heterostructures, catalysts, among other materials.

Adam Leontowich

Associate Scientist at the Canadian Light Source

Adam received a B.Sc degree in Chemistry from the University of Saskatchewan in 2008. In the summers, he worked in the labs of Prof. Matthew Paige and Prof. Robert Scott, synthesizing and characterizing nanoparticles and ligands for catalysis. Adam then moved to Hamilton, Ontario to pursue a Ph.D in Chemistry at McMaster University, applying the scanning transmission X-ray microscope (STXM) for a new purpose: patterning and lithography at the sub-50 nm scale. Upon defending his thesis in 2012, he accepted a post-doctorate position in the X-ray Optics for Extreme Conditions group lead by Dr. Sasa Bajt, at DESY, Hamburg, Germany. There he fabricated multilayer structures, including multilayer Laue lenses for hard X-ray microscopes, and reflective coatings for EUV and soft X-rays. In 2013 Adam returned to CLS and has been there ever since. First, he led the design, construction and commissioning of a new cryo-STXM for the SM beamline. Then in 2016 he was convinced by Dr. Ariel Gomez to take the jump into reciprocal space and join the Brockhouse Sector, an empty patch of concrete floor that would soon become three hard X-ray beamlines. Adam continues to develop and deliver the many endstations at BXDS, including the powder diffraction and SAXS/WAXS user programs, and is interested in the fate of nanoparticles in wildlife and the environment.