International Summer School of Crystallography at CFEL
38 participants of 24 different nationalities from nine different countries came to CFEL to attend the first International Summer School for Crystallography from May 11 to May 17. The PhD students from Poland, France, Canada, England, Belarus, China, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Germany spent a whole week on the physics of scattering in theory and experiments. Ranging from rock layers and materials science to the investigation of proteins or medications – crystallography is extremely prevalent and one of the most important tools to explore the inner structure of materials.
“I am very happy that we could win Prof. Carmelo Giacovazzo as speaker for the whole week. He is an expert on crystallography and led us through the theory and history of crystallography,” the organizer Cornelius Gati says. The PhD student in Prof. Henry Chapman’s group received financial and organizational support from PIER, CUI, CFEL, IMPRS, XFEL and DESY.
With regards to content, the main focus of the summer school was on the mathematical background of crystallography. In addition, Dr. Thomas Schneider gave a talk and a tour through the European Molecular Laboratory (EMBL); Dr. Adrian Mancuso (XFEL) talked about instrumentation, Prof. Henry Chapman about “Serial Femtosecond Crystallography”, and Dr. Thomas White about computer-aided data processing.
Furthermore, Dr. Ralf Koehn, scientific coordinator of CFEL, introduced the graduate schools CUI, IMPRS and PIER, and presented Hamburg as an attractive location for PhD students.