The coalition hosted its 23rd annual event on Tuesday, May 16, 2017; this year’s theme was “Investments in Scientific and Educational Research: Fueling American Innovation.” The CHESS poster “The future of synchrotron science” showcased work by David and Chris, displaying how the investment in education at CHESS produces outstanding results.

In an effort to encourage a more diverse pool of students to participate in summer research programs, CHESS has adopted a new model for supporting students when they leave their own college campuses during the summer. The Summer Undergraduate Research in Science and Engineering (SUNRiSE) program brings students and faculty members from their home institutions to Cornell University for the summer months, offering opportunities for visiting faculty to conduct their experiments on CHESS beamlines and allowing students the chance to participate in cutting-edge research at the laboratory.

BioSAXS Essentials is specifically designed as a short, just-the-essentials course for non-specialists wishing to collect and publish BioSAXS data for the first time.

Their objective is to train students to excel using a multidisciplinary and international approach, where students have the opportunity to choose from large-scale facilities across the globe to develop their research.

The Education and Outreach team was delighted to have been invited to speak during a parallel workshop session offered on the third day of the User meeting entitled “Bringing Big Science into the Classroom”. This all-day session, organized in part by Dr. Aleida Perez and her colleagues at the Office of Educational Programs, featured NSLS-II and CFN scientists sharing highlights of recent educational initiatives aimed at secondary science educators.

Which structures are they going to form and how will they be oriented? Would mixing allow a finetuning of the thin film structures for special applications, e.g. in nanolithography, without resorting to substrate prestructuring? The team investigated blends of long and short PS-b-P2VP (polystyrene-b-Poly(2-vinylpyridine) with a length ratio of short to long chains of 1:6.9. Each of these polymers microphase separate into lamellar structures by itself, albeit with different period. Blends should feature coexisting domains of thin and thick AB lamellae [2,3].

Visualizing the shape of the receptor has also allowed them to make a second groundbreaking discovery: They observed that five painkiller molecules they tested did not bind the receptor at the place they expected, which could explain why these painkillers lack efficacy in human patients.

This discovery, published Dec. 9, 2016, in the journal eLife, lays the foundations to create targeted and effective molecules to manage chronic pain.

As a reminder, the changes to the storage ring will:

This was the year his “Blue Period” began, and remains a time of great interest to art historians and enthusiasts alike. Technical analysis of paintings made during this period are one approach to finding clues into as-yet understood aspects of Picasso’s experience and process. The recent discovery of a buried portrait below one of his first blue period paintings, “The Blue Room,” (The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St NW, Washington DC) offers an example of two paintings, each by Picasso, that represent snapshots of this transition.

For Chaney Miller ’14 CEE it was freshman year. “I got to Cornell without taking a physics class before,” says Miller, who was admitted to Cornell in the College of Arts & Sciences. But before arriving on campus, she enrolled in engineering courses instead. When she changed paths to transfer into civil engineering, she had to take several physics courses with no foundation in the subject. “I felt like giving up something like eight times that semester,” says Miller. “But I am hard-headed and I saw it as a challenge so I stuck with it.”