Proposal for a U.S. XAFS conference
Hello All: Next year is the IXS meeting but for two years after that , there will be no conference dedicated to XAS for another 3 years. I have been looking into establishing a topical meeting (with the focus changing from year to year) in the United States in years that IXS is not being held. The first one of these would be 2010. My proposal is to associate the meeting with the Denver X-ray Conference (DXC) which is held in Colorado in early August. The advantages of association with this conference is that the people who organize the DXC are able and willing to take care of all the logistics (conference fees, rooms, hotel, etc.) and there would only be a need to have a scientific organizing group. In fact, the DXC has been host to several satellite meetings: lst year the fiber diffraction community held a session and this year, there is a parallel conference on stress analysis. Since XAS is an x-ray technique, I think that it would be a good fit. I have discussed this with the DXC organizers and they have indicated a willingness to be involved. The advantages of running such a conference is that there would be an XAS outlet for students to be involved with that would not be too expensive to attend in the years of no IXS. I am intending this message primarily for list members in the US (apologies to everyone else!) and I would appreciate any comments you might have about this idea before I begin to set it in motion. If Matt is OK with the conversation continuing on the list we can keep the replies public but if he prefers not to clog the list, please contact me directly. Carlo -- Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College Illinois Institute of Technology Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494 segre@iit.edu http://www.iit.edu/~segre segre@debian.org
Hi Carlo, I think this is a great idea! --Scott Calvin Sarah Lawrence College At 02:23 PM 4/17/2008, you wrote:
I have been looking into establishing a topical meeting (with the focus changing from year to year) in the United States in years that IXS is not being held.
Hi Carlo, Thanks for taking up this cause! I definitely think the topic is appropriate with this discussion list. I also think the idea of having more XAFS workshops and conferences is a great idea in general. Since I'm supposed to be representing "North America" for the International X-ray Absorption Society (IXAS), I'm particularly happy to have them here -- I also think that improving the knowledge about XAFS among scientists at all levels is needed here. The Denver X-ray Conference is a good match -- the only other options I can think of are Users Meetings at synchrotrons or the American Crystallographic Association meeting. Synchrotron User Meetings are a good match for workshops, but probably not appropriate for an established topical meeting. The ACA meetings seem to have a small overlap with XAFS, which is unfortunate. The IUCr actually does have a Commission on XAFS: it was dormant for many years, but is being revitalized, and the IUCr meeting in Osaka will have an XAFS session and a companion tutorial workshop. But the IUCr really is a union of national crystallographic associations -- for North America that's the ACA. So to *really* be part of the IUCr (which could have tangible benefits), it would be nice to have an active XAFS scientific interest group within the ACA. That's all to say that the ACA meetings shouldn't be dismissed immediately, but if the DXC folks are willing to put up XAFS infecting their meeting, that sounds good. Personally, I've been to one DXC and one ACA meeting, and I agree with your pick. Thanks again for working on this! --Matt
participants (3)
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Carlo Segre
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Matt Newville
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Scott Calvin