Dr. Sho Ito received his M.S. degree in 2014 from Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he was engaged in structural analysis of membrane proteins. Immediately after joining Rigaku, he was transferred to the synchrotron radiation facility, SPring-8, where he started his work as a beamline scientist and worked mainly on software development for protein crystallography, device development for room temperature structural analysis, and structural analysis of more than 300 proteins. During this time, he received his PhD from the University of Hyogo. He is currently working on electron diffraction at Rigaku headquarters.
Dr. Brandon Q. Mercado began his chemical career as an undergraduate researcher focused on fullerene functionalization with Prof. Christopher J. Smart at Vassar College. He then completed his gradate work on endohedral fullerene characterization with Prof. Marilyn M. Olmstead and Prof. Alan L. Balch at the University of California, Davis. His postdoctoral work as an Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy researcher focused on the fabrication and characterization of regimented arrays of quantum dots with Prof. Matthew D. Law at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently the crystallographer with the Chemical and Biophysical Instrumentation Center at Yale University where is teaches a course on small molecule diffraction and assists with structure determination.
Enrico Mugnaioli undertook his Ph.D. at the Department of Earth Sciences University of Siena (Italy), working on the characterization of asbestos minerals by TEM. He later moved into Ute Kolb’s group at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Germany), and he was one of the first developers and users of the 3D electron diffraction method. From 2013 to 2017 he was PI of the Italian national project FIR2013 Exploring the nanoworld, dedicated to the application of electron diffraction methods for the characterization of geologic and extra-terrestrial samples and the analysis of porous materials. Since April 2017 he has been collaborating with Mauro Gemmi at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (CNI@NEST - Pisa). He is involved in the development and application of electron crystallography methods for the structure characterization of nanocrystalline and beam-sensitive materials, with special focus on nanoparticles, minerals, porous materials, pharmaceuticals, and macromolecules.
Lukas Palatinus studied mineralogy and geochemistry at the Charles University in Prague. During his PhD. At the University Bayreuth, Germany he focused on the crystallographic analysis of modulated structures. Later, during the post-doc stay at the EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, he developed the program Superflip for the solution of the crystallographic phase problem for periodic and aperiodic crystals, using the iterative dual space algorithms.
Since 2009, Dr. Palatinus is the head of the group of electron crystallography at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He and his co-workers are developing methods for crystal structure analysis from electron diffraction data, with the main focus is on the structure refinement from 3D electron diffraction using the dynamical diffraction theory.
Fraser White began his career as a crystallographer under the tutelage of Professor Simon Parsons in the Chemistry department at the Univeristy of Edinburgh in 2004. Following completion of his PhD, he stayed at Edinburgh, accepting the position of staff crystallographer tasked with running the departmental X-ray crystallography service. During this time Fraser solved and refined over 1000 structures for a variety of different sample chemistries and gained broad experience in solving crystallographic problems. After several years in this role, Fraser first joined Agilent technologies in 2011 as an applications scientist based in Oxfordshire and remained with the company through the acquisition of Agilent’s single crystal business by Rigaku in 2015. Now in the role of product marketing manager for Rigaku Oxford Diffraction, Fraser is involved in the scientific aspects of single-crystal product marketing.
After completing a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechatronics) degree at the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia, Hongyi went on to pursue a PhD degree in materials engineering, specialized in electron microscopy and semiconductor nano-materials. The Australian Government sponsored his PhD study through the Australian Postgraduate Award program. He obtained his PhD degree at UQ in Dec 2013, and received the Dean’s accommodation for academic excellence as well as the best thesis of the year award from the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering. In Feb. 2014, Hongyi started his postdoc fellowship (Wenner-Gren Foundation postdoc award) in Prof. Xiaodong Zou’s group at Stockholm University. In 2015, he initiated the development of MicroED (3D electron diffraction technique for studying biomolecules) at Zou’s group. Hongyi became a principle investigator in 2018 to further develop and apply electron crystallography methods for studying structures of biomolecules. Recently, Hongyi and colleagues solved the first two previously unknown protein structures using MicroED. They have also shown that it is possible to reveal protein inhibitor binding by MicroED. Hongyi is now working as a researcher/principle investigator at Stockholm University.