Applications for the 2022/23 Year in Industry scheme have now closed.
These 12 month placements are paid positions and will provide successful students with an opportunity to work on a research or development project within Diamond. The placements will be paid at a rate in excess of £19,000pa on a pro-rata basis. Placements will commence in September 2022.
In your application you can apply for up to three projects from those listed. Please click on each of the projects to find out more information.
Tips for your Application
Development of correlative cryo-imaging solutions for the in cellulo assessment of side effects and efficacy of pharmaceuticals
To date, methods employed for drug development and pre-clinical assessment are primarily based on physicochemical parameters such as proteomics, NMR, spectroscopy, calorimetry and ELISA. These traditional drug profiling approaches, although capable of delivering biophysical attributes, do not currently include high resolution 3D observation of either drug delivery vesicles or drug-induced cellular responses.
This project aims to develop a high-throughput correlative 3D imaging process for biomaterials and recipient cells to better understand the action of pharmaceutivals within and across cell populations. This will become the basis of a new pre-clinical testing method and provide a tool for industrial partners to further validate drug suitability during research and development.
To apply for this project, select “22001Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Enabling artificial intelligence capabilities in Savu software
Savu is a Python package, developed in the Data Analysis Group, used to process and reconstruct parallel-beam tomography data. Data processing pipelines in Savu can be built using plugins stacked together to form a sequential chain of processing events, e.g., reconstruction, filtering, data correction etc. The plugins are written to work with data from different imaging modalities and beamlines.
Tomography data processing is experiment and sample dependent, making it problematic for inexperienced users and time consuming for beamline staff. With the choice of plugins in Savu broadening and the amount of data collected increasing, particularly with Diamond II upgrade in mind, it is important for the community to look towards automation. Now is a suitable time to capitalise on the amount of Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence research in progress both on campus and further afield, to investigate the potential to automatically determine which plugins are suitable for which data.
One of such tasks can be automatically identifying noise levels and type of artifacts (outliers) in the data, to create bespoke processing for a particular sample and experimental setup. This would have a significant impact on the tomography user experience, and ensure we are using state-of-the-art processing techniques to remain at the forefront of scientific research.
To apply for this project, select “22002Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Fast Beam-Based Alignment for the Diamond Storage Ring
This project will develop a new software tool to speed up the routine procedure of preparing the Diamond Storage Ring for user operation following a shutdown or intervention.
For optimal performance, the electron beam should pass through the centre of each quadrupole magnet in the storage ring. Misalignments creep in over time and need to be corrected. Beam-based alignment (BBA) is a method to restore the optimal alignment by measuring the effect of each magnet on the path of the beam itself. There is a reliable method in use at present, but it is slow, taking six to eight hours to complete. This project will implement a new algorithm, dubbed Fast BBA, that has the potential to greatly reduce the time required for the alignment procedure. It will build on work already done at Diamond to prototype and investigate the fast BBA method, and on work published by other facilities around the world.
To apply for this project, select “22003Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Structural and Functional Studies of Small Membrane Proteins
Recent biomedical advances including anti-viral and anti-cancer immunotherapies, and structure-based drug design are driven by insights from structural biology. Despite notable structure-based successes, membrane proteins remain difficult targets and consequently a significant challenge. Membrane protein targets are comparatively high-risk, expensive and require significant optimisation for success. The Membrane Protein Laboratory was established to ensure that membrane protein structural biology was more accessible by combining recently developed high-throughput technologies for protein production, crystallisation and cryoelectron microscopy with the data collection systems at Diamond Light Source. We have welcomed well over 250 visiting scientists to our facility and supported research that has led to at least one atomic resolution membrane protein structure a year since 2012.
Membrane proteins are found at the junctions between the outside world and the inner workings of the cell. Multicellular organisms such as humans use membrane proteins for communication, to acquire nutrients and detect threats. More than half of all medicines alter membrane protein function. It is important to link structure to function, but when we remove membrane proteins from their membranes in order to study them, we lose their native lipid–based environment which can drastically affect membrane protein function. Reconstitution into liposomes (essentially balls of lipids), allows us to mimic membranes and restore function. We can additionally define the lipid content, enabling the effect of different lipids on structure and function to be studied.
To apply for this project, select “22004Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Structure and chemical reactivity in photoelectrochemical systems
The aim of this project is to develop and test a sample environment for characterizing photoelectrochemical processes during surface x-ray diffraction experiments.
Photo-electrochemical processes are particular electrochemical processes that involve the transformation of light in other form of energy. These processes are at the base of dye-sensitized solar cells, photoelectrochemical reduction of CO2 and photoelectrochemical splitting of water that is used for the production of hydrogen from water and solar energy. In order to prepare more efficient electrodes for such processes it's important to understand the relations between the chemical behaviour of the materials and their structure. The I07 beamline is using high energy x-rays to investigate the structure of liquid-solid interfaces and thanks to exceptional brilliance of its source is capable to measure the crystallographic structure of nanometric films and single atomic layers on the crystalline electrode surfaces during reaction conditions.
To apply for this project, select “22005Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Developing an interactive web interface for a ptychographic imaging application
Ptychography is a high-resolution imaging technique widely used at the Diamond Light Source for research in fields such as Biology, Chemistry, Material Science and many more. It relies on iterative phase retrieval algorithms which are implemented in the GPU-accelerated reconstruction software package PtyPy. However, this software tool is command-line based and requires user interaction with long and complicated configuration files.
The aim of this project is to transform this command-line tool into a modern web application. This requires the development of a web server (e.g. using flask) running ptychographic reconstructions with PtyPy on resources provided by a containerised platform such as Kubernetes. Furthermore, this also includes the design of an interactive cross-platform UI/UX (e.g. using Vue.js) providing a simple interface that will make ptychographic imaging at Diamond more accessible to the non-specialist.
To apply for this project, select “22006Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Mineralization in marine algae using synchrotron light
Biominerals are hard tissues grown by organisms, and can be made of many different materials and designs, that often have surprising or useful material properties. One example of this is coccolithophores, which are marine single cells that grow calcium carbonate scales in an intracellular compartment, before extruding them to form an outer shell around the cell wall. The structures they create (coccoliths) are tiny (2-5 microns), but still manage to be intricate and show highly controlled crystal growth. By discovering the mechanism by which the cell influences crystal growth we can take inspiration for synthetic material design and production.
In this project we will investigate how calcium travels from the external source (seawater) into the coccolith growing compartment, using a combination of light microscopy and synchrotron x-ray experiments. We will also investigate the response of these cells to the highly focused x-ray beam available at beamline I14 – the hard x-ray nanoprobe at Diamond Light Source.
To apply for this project, select “22007Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Next generation AI vision
You will be working on cutting-edge technologies that will pave the way for the next evolution in AI Vision.
The use of AI Vision (Artificial intelligence paired with traditional computer vision) for processing and making sense of 2-dimensional images (e.g. photos from a camera) is now commonplace. Smartphones come bundled with AI software that can process photos on the fly to automatically correct for lighting or tag people and landmarks. Industry uses AI Vision to detect defects and predict future failures without human intervention.
At the same time, the availability of hardware capable of acquiring 3-dimensional (3D) images is also commonplace. For example, the latest iPad and iPhones have integrated LiDARs enabling the capture of 3D images.
To apply for this project, select “22008Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Design, Analysis, Modelling and Testing of a Magnetically Levitating Motion Stage - Electronics
The stability and accuracy of sample scanning stages directly define the Synchrotron X-ray microscope tomography & ptychography resolution. As the X-ray detectors and X-ray sources improve so must the motion systems to keep Diamond’s standing as a world class research facility. The cutting edge motion stage technology is now magnetic levitation (Maglev) which is employed with nanometre accuracy during computer chip manufacture. The aim of this project is to create, demonstrate & document a design methodology for such stages.
We are looking for two students to work together on the project, to learn, apply and understand the implications of mechatronics driven design.
This project will look at the sensors, non-linear control, dynamic analysis in the time and frequency domain (Using MATLAB Simulink) and magnetic aspects.
To apply for this project, select “22009Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Design, Analysis, Modelling and Testing of a Magnetically Levitating Motion Stage - Mechanical
The stability and accuracy of sample scanning stages directly define the Synchrotron X-ray microscope tomography & ptychography resolution. As the X-ray detectors and X-ray sources improve so must the motion systems to keep Diamond’s standing as a world class research facility. The cutting edge motion stage technology is now magnetic levitation (Maglev) which is employed with nanometre accuracy during computer chip manufacture. The aim of this project is to create, demonstrate & document a design methodology for such stages.
We are looking for two students to work together on the project, to learn, apply and understand the implications of mechatronics driven design.
The mechanical student will look at the 3D CAD design (Using Creo Software), thermal, electro-magnetic & vibration finite element analysis (Using ANSYS).
To apply for this project, select “22010Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
Design, Model and Assemble a Multi-Temperature Chemistry Reactor
In this project, you will use your design and prototyping skills to make a multi-temperature reactor array. The reactor will use a combination of different materials, geometry, and control engineering to generate different heating zones for chemical reactions. You will be innovating reactor designs that are essential for expanding the scope of chemistry that can be executed on a liquid handling robot. Computational tools and simulation will evolve your designs. You will design, model, and select the best prototype for construction of a working prototype.
To apply for this project, select “22011Y” on our recruitment portal.
Remember that you can apply for up to three projects in your application, if you wish.
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