One of SLAC's newest faculty members, Soichi Wakatsuki, says it was not any one thing that drew him here to help build and lead the lab's biosciences program. Rather it was many things: SLAC's cutting-edge X-ray facilities, the Linac Coherent Light Source and Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource; the future potential for developing the world's most powerful synchrotron, PEP-X, on site; and the prospect of forging strong collaborations with researchers at Stanford University, where Wakatsuki holds a joint appointment at the School of Medicine.
Career Profiles
January 10, 2013
A Few Questions with … is an informal, occasionally irreverent feature in which SLAC employees offer their answers to questions about SLAC, science and life in general.
If this were an awards show at SLAC, the emcee would introduce John Galayda by saying, "And now, a gentleman who needs no introduction...." And then the emcee would introduce him anyway.
April 12, 2012
I did my degree in Bremen in Biology, specialising in Biochemistry, before doing my Diploma at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for tropical medicine, where I researched diseases such as ebola and yellow fever. It was here that I first became interested in structural biology and X-ray crystallography, which led me to do my PhD in crystallography at the EMBL Hamburg Outstation at the DESY synchrotron, which lasted four years. At that time, research in membrane proteins was a lot more challenging i.e. membrane protein structural biology, which few people were looking into, and there had been only about fifty structures described.
November 4, 2011
Fifteen years ago, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) scientist Apurva Mehta volunteered to help a friend build beamline parts at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL). Today, he's "still mucking around with beamlines."
In the latest 10 Questions, Dr. Mehta shares how he landed at SLAC and his adventures in a wide range of projects, from advanced semiconductors to ancient Greek pottery.
June 13, 2011
"It takes a village," as Hillary Clinton famously wrote, "to raise a child." Similarly, says physicist Claudio Pellegrini, it takes an entire scientific community to create a ground-breaking new piece of technology—one that not only adds to the store of human knowledge through its use, but requires its designers to push back scientific and technological frontiers just to build it in the first place. The Linac Coherent Light Source is a case in point.
January 23, 2011
While officially billed as a physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, our latest 10 Questions guest may be more aptly titled a scientific detective. In this fascinating addition to 10 Questions you’ll learn about how he used x-ray techniques to uncover historical mysteries from fossilized dinosaur remains to ancient mathematical texts.
August 11, 2010
Some people seem to be born knowing just what they want to do with their lives. Some people never figure out what they want to be when they grow up. SLAC Instrument Scientist John Bozek falls into a third category. When it came time to choose a career, he wasn't sure want he wanted, but he knew what he loved.
June 21, 2010
After completing A-levels in Maths, Physics and Chemistry, I studied for an Master of Physics degree at the University of Leicester. Throughout my time as an undergraduate, I grew to love the city, and was impressed by the research within the Physics department. This inspired me to undertake a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Colin Norris & Dr. Chris Nicklin at Leicester. My PhD was industrially sponsored by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (now Qinetiq) and concentrated on the use of synchrotron light, and complementary techniques, to probe the structure of semiconductor surfaces and superlattice interfaces. Understanding the growth and ordering of semiconductor layers is vitally important to create the nanotechnology devices that we all rely upon in our daily lives.