Plenary & Invited Speakers

Plenary Speakers: 

Toshi Kanaya, Japanese Society for Neutron Science (JSNS) / Kyoto University, Japan
Toshi Kanaya is a professor at the Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University since 2003. He is also the president of the Japanese Society for Neutron Science (JSNS). His research interests are in soft matter science, in particular polymer science, using quantum beams such as neutrons and synchrotron x-ray radiation.

Ho-kwang Mao, Carnegie Institution of Washington, US
Ho-kwang (David) Mao received his B.S. in Geology (1963) from the National Taiwan University, and M.S. (1966) and Ph.D. (1968) from the University of Rochester, where he conducted high-pressure deep Earth research under the guidance of Professors Bill Bassett and Taro Takahashi. Mao started as a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr. Peter M. Bell at the Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington, and later became a Staff Geophysicist. During the past four decades, he has pioneered the development of high-pressure diamond-anvil cell techniques and a wide range of synchrotron x-ray, neutron, optical, electrical, and magnetic probes for in-situ diagnosis of samples under extreme pressures and temperatures.

Linda Nazar, University of Waterloo, Canada
Linda Nazar is a Professor of Chemistry and Electrical Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and holds a Senior Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials. She was born in Vancouver, Canada, where she completed her Honors BSc at the University of British Columbia with special distinction. She received her PhD degree at the University of Toronto in the area of zeolite materials chemistry under the stewardship of Professor Geoffrey Ozin. She went on to Exxon Corporate Research in Annandale N.J. USA to take up a postdoctoral fellowship in the Inorganic Materials Division under the leadership of Dr. Allan Jacobson, now a holder of a Robert Welch professorship at the University of Houston (USA) prior to joining the University of Waterloo. Her electrochemistry research is focused on solid state energy materials with research spanning Li-ion and Na-ion batteries, Li-sulfur and Li-air batteries, and energy conversion materials.

Toby Perring, ISIS Facility, Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK
Toby Perring is based at the ISIS Facility at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. His research interests are the magnetism of strongly correlated electron materials, including manganese oxides, low-dimensional magnetic systems and iron based superconductors, in which he studies mainly the spin dynamics using inelastic neutron scattering. He was responsible for the specification for the MAPS spectrometer at ISIS, the first time-of-flight instrument designed specifically for single crystal spectroscopy, and has developed methods and software to fully map the magnetic and structural dynamics in single crystals. He is an STFC Fellow and Honorary Professor of Physics at University College London.

Christian Pfleiderer, Technische Universität München, Germany
The aim of Professor Christian Pfleiderer's research is to search systematically for new material properties arising from strong electronic correlations. Examples include new forms of magnetism, unconventional superconduction and anomalous metallic states. His experimental methodologies include single crystal growth of intermetallic compounds under high-purity conditions, the measurement of transport and volume properties under extreme conditions and a wide range of neutron scattering methods.
Christian Pfleiderer studied physics at the University of Tübingen and the University of Denver: his PhD is from Cambridge University. Following postdoctoral work at CEA Grenoble and periods as a research associate and head of a Helmholtz junior research group at Karlsruhe Research Center, he became an associate professor at TUM in 2004. He is currently Vice Chairman of the German Committee for Neutron Research (KFN).

Jeremy C. Smith, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Tennessee, US
Jeremy C. Smith obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of London. In October 2006, Smith became the first Governor's Chair at the University of Tennessee and also Director of the UT/ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His move to Tennessee arose from the presence at ORNL of world-class supercomputing capabilities and the Spallation Neutron Source, as the combination of neutron scattering with computer simulation has been a sustained interest of his.

Smith has performed and directed research in high-performance computer simulation of biological macromolecules, neutron scattering in biology, the physics of proteins, enzyme catalysis, bioenergy, environmental biogeochemistry and the analysis of structural change in proteins.

Philip Withers, BP International Centre for Advanced Materials (BP-ICAM), The University of Manchester, UK
Professor Philip Withers obtained his PhD in Metallurgy at Cambridge University and took up a lectureship there, before taking up a Chair in Manchester in 1998. In recent years, Withers set up the Manchester X-ray Imaging Facility combining both lab, X-ray scanners and a beamline at the Diamond Light Source for 3D X-ray imaging across scales from 1m to 50nm which he co-directs with Professor Peter Lee.

He was awarded the Royal Society Armourers & Brasiers' Company Prize for pioneering use of neutron and x-ray beams to map stresses and image components in 2010. In 2012 Phil became the Director of the new BP International Centre for Advanced Materials, aimed at advancing the fundamental understanding and use of materials across a variety of oil and gas industrial applications.

Invited Speakers:

Hartmut Abele - Vienna University of Technology (Vienna, Austria)

Adam Aczel - Quantum Condensed Matter Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge (TN, USA)

Masa Arai - JPARC Centre, Japan Atomic Energy Agency (Tokai, Japan)

Dimitri Argyriou - European Spallation Source (Lund, Sweden)

Meigan Aronson - Department of Physics & Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook (NY, USA)

Philippe Bourges - Laboratoire Leon Brillouin, CEA (Saclay, France)

Laurent Chapon - Institut Laue-Langevin (Grenoble, France)

Sung-Min Choi - Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Daejeon, Korea)

Lyndon Edwards - Insitute of Materials Engineering, Australian Nuclear Science & Technology Organisation (NSW, Australia)

Stephan Foerster - Department of Physical Chemistry, University of Bayreuth (Bayreuth, Germany)

Giovanna Fragneto - Institut Laue-Langevin (Grenoble, France)

Ian Gentle - School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, The University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia)

Andrew Goodwin - Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford (Oxford, England)

Brendan Kennedy - Department of Chemistry, University of Sydney (Sydney, Australia)

Stefan Klotz - IMPMC - Institute of Mineralogy and Condensed Matter Physics (Paris, France)

Sean Langridge - ISIS Facility, STFC UK (Didcot, England)

Stephen Lee - School of Physics & Astronomy, University of St Andrews (St Andrews, Scotland)

Mark Lumsden - Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge (TN, USA)

Rob McKenna - Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville (FL, USA)

Subhasish Mazumder - Solid State Physics, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Mumbai, India)

Stefan T Ochsenbein - Paul Scherrer Institut (Villigen, Switzerland)

Je-Geun Park - Department of Physics & Astronomy, Seoul National University (Seoul, Korea)

Sarah Rogers - Science and Technology Facilities Council (Oxford, UK)

Christoph Salzmann - Department of Chemistry, University College London (London, England)

Helmut Schober - Institut Laue-Langevin (Grenoble, France)

Melissa Sharp - European Spallation Source (Lund, Sweden)

Yuichi Shimakawa - Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University (Kyoto, Japan)

Neal Skipper - Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London (London, England)

Jochen Stahn - Laboratory for Neutron Scattering, Paul Scherrer Institute (Villigen, Switzerland)

Oliver Stockert - Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (Dresden, Germany)