Day 21 - Meet the ILO Team

It's day 21 of the Diamond Industrial Liaison advent calendar and time to meet the whole team.

Since joining Diamond in 2007, Elizabeth Shotton has been the Head of the Industrial Liaison Group, responsible for all proprietary use of Diamond’s facilities. After a PhD at University College London studying solid state properties of pigments, she worked at Daresbury Laboratory for 10 years in the industrial group. Her main research areas are in the application of X-ray powder diffraction and small molecule crystallography to industrially relevant samples.  

Read Elizabeth's biography here....

Claire Pizzey is Deputy Head of the Industrial Liaison group, taking specific responsibility for X-ray scattering experiments with or on behalf of industrial partners at Diamond. Prior to joining the Industrial Liaison Group in 2010, Claire was a senior beamline support scientist for the Non Crystalline Diffraction beamline. A physical chemist by training, Claire was previously a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

Read Claire's biography here...

Anna Kroner is a Senior Industrial Liaison Scientist at Diamond specialising in spectroscopy. Anna jointed Diamond in January 2009 after completing her PhD at the University of Southampton and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), where she undertook research into the characterisation of heterogeneous catalysts by the multi-technique set up of X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy, Diffuse Reflectance Infrared Fourier Transform Spectroscopy and Mass Spectrometry (XAS/DRIFTS/MS) in time-resolved, in situ conditions. Her role at Diamond is to establish collaboration with industrial users by providing support to existing industrial users in the field of spectroscopy and promoting the capabilities of the facility to potential customers.

Read Anna's biography here...

Leigh Connor is a Senior Industrial Liaison Scientist at Diamond Light Source with research expertise in the area of metallurgy and high energy diffraction. He joined the Industrial Liaison Office in March 2012 after working as a post-doctoral research associate on the joint engineering, environmental and processing beamline (I12) at Diamond Light Source. He completed his Rolls-Royce sponsored PhD in 2007, studying nickel base superalloys for gas turbine disc application at the University of Cambridge. Prior to his PhD Leigh worked in industry for a number of years at two metallurgy foundries.  He works with industrial users to help solve real world problems by utilising techniques such as powder diffraction, high energy 2D diffraction, X-ray imaging and pair distribution function measurements.

Read Leigh's biography here...

Alex Dias is an Industrial Liaison Scientist for Macromolecular Crystallography. His main interest is in X-ray crystallography applications for drug discovery with a keen interest in complementary techniques, such as Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) and Circular Dichroism (CD), both of which which provide additional structural information regarding the macromolecule of interest (for example conformational changes and studies of ligand binding).Alex's main role as an industrial liaison scientist is to support and assist our industrial users on the different MX beamlines. He is also in charge of the MX Mail-in activities.

Read Alex's biography here...

Jitka's role as an Industrial Liaison Scientist is to assist industrial users with diffraction data collection on the MX beamlines and further establish and maintain collaboration with Diamond’s industrial partners. Together with other members of the Industrial Liaison team she work towards gaining maximal benefit from accessibility of complementary techniques such as Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) or Circular Dichroism (CD) to provide complex information about biological systems.

Read Jitka's biography here...

Sally is our Industrial Liaison Scientist specialising in X-ray imaging. After completing her PhD with the School of Physics at Monash University in Australia in 2010, Sally spent over 3 years as a post-doctoral fellow working within the tomographic microscopy group (TOMCAT) at the Swiss Light Source. With a background specialising in X-ray phase contrast and ultra-fast tomographic imaging, Sally has many years of experience gained from experiments conducted on synchrotron beamlines in Japan, Australia, the US, Switzerland and now the UK. Sally will be works closely with industrial users in order to assist them in taking full advantage of the diverse range of imaging capabilities on offer at a selection of Diamond’s beamlines.

Read Sally's biography here...

One of our Industrial Liaison Scientists  in Macromolecular Crystallography, Marco Mazzorana graduated in Organic Chemistry from the University of Padua under the direction of Prof. Giuseppe Zanotti. He then joined the group of Professor Lorenzo A. Pinna for his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Biophysics. His thesis focused on the structural characterisation of protein kinase CK2 isoforms and of protein-inhibitor complexes. After a short post-doc at the Venetian Institute of Molecular Medicine (VIMM, Padua) and three years at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO, Madrid), he joined Diamond Light Source as part of the I02 Beamline team in March 2011. 

Read Marco's biography here...

Sin-Yuen Chang is a postdoctoral research associate in the Industrial Liaison team at Diamond Light Source Ltd. joining in January 2016. Prior to this, she undertook PhD studies at The University of Manchester studying metal speciation and nucleation in complex functional liquid systems. Her role at Diamond is to develop soft X-ray core level spectroscopies for applied research, in collaboration with Sven Schroeder's team. She supports industrial users of Diamond in the field of spectroscopy while also carrying out independent research.

Read Sin-Yuen's biography here...

Renjie Zhang joined the Industrial Liaison Team in 2016 as fragment soaking facility laboratory manager. He completed his master degree with school of bioscience from university of Nottingham in 2007. Then he worked for a numbers of years providing technical support to the structure biology study group from MRC (Simon Phillips, RCaH). His current main responsibilities are management of the fragments soaking platform and provision of scientific guidance for facility users. In addition, he co-ordinates the fragments soaking user program, including the scheduling of academic and industrial users.

Read Renjie's biography here...

As the Industrial Liaison Marketing Manager, Zoë takes the lead in scientific communications and outreach to the industrial community through the delivery of marketing and PR activities and the management of the Industrial Liaison website and social media accounts. She co-ordinates the Industrial Liaison programme of events and supports the business development activities of the team. Having worked at Diamond for 7 years, Zoë previously co-ordinated Diamond’s extensive scientific events programme of workshops and conference and managed the organisation’s open access programme for publications. A scientist by training, Zoë holds a degree in Pharmacology from Leeds University.

Read Zoë's Biography here...

We’re always happy to discuss any enquiries or talk about ways in which access to Diamond’s facilities may be beneficial to your business so please do give us a call on 01235 778797 or send us an e-mail. You can keep in touch with the latest development by following us on Twitter @DiamondILO orLinkedIn.