Speakers

Director of Research at CNRS

KB is a CNRS researcher at the Institut de Mineralogie, Physique des Matériaux et Cosmochimie. He studies present and past interactions between life and minerals, their impact on geochemical cycles and the search of traces of life

Lead Scientist

Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource

Sam Webb has a strong background in the chemistry of environmental and geological materials. During his Ph.D. research he began to use synchrotron based techniques to examine the chemistry of contaminants in the environment using non-invasive x-ray analyses. This has lead to the development of a strong research program using x-ray fluorescence, x-ray spectroscopy, and x-ray diffraction to investigate a wide variety of chemistries in materials that cross many disciplines. Sam operates the micro-scale x-ray imaging program at SSRL, and manages the science program and user operations at four beam line stations.

Professor

Department of Soil, Water, and Climate

University of Minnesota

Prof. Toner is a member of the graduate faculty for both the Land and Atmospheric Science (LAAS) and Earth and Environmental Science (ESCI) programs. She is an aqueous geochemist with a passion for how metals behave in natural and contaminated systems. Prof. Toner’s research expertise is in measuring the specific chemical form, called speciation, of metals in the environment. All of Prof. Toner’s projects are collaborative, often with microbiologists, geochemical and physical modelers, and beamline scientists. At present, she spends much of her research time thinking about how microbes can “make a living” in the deep continental biosphere, how iron-bearing particles can be transported 1000s of kilometers from their point of origin in the deep ocean, and how to interpret particles detected on the surfaces of icy ocean moons like Enceladus.

Group Lead, Microscopy, APS

Advanced Photon Source

Argonne National Laboratory

Barry Lai has been involved with developing instrumentation, methods, and applications of x-ray microprobes and nanoprobes. He is currently the group leader of the Microscopy Group at the APS.

Head of the Heterogeneous and Hierarchical Matter Division

LNLS-CNPEM

Helio Tolentino is a researcher at the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS), which is one of the national labs of the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM) in Campinas, SP, Brazil, since 2014. He is also the Head of the Heterogeneous and Hierarchical Matter Division (DMH) of the LNLS since 2020. He is a researcher on leave for a long period of the CNRS, France, since 2015. Since then, he coordinates the project and construction of the Carnaúba (X-ray nanoprobe) beamline for the new Brazilian synchrotron light source, Sirius. Its main research interests are in the physics and chemistry of condensed matter systems, with emphasis in heterogeneous and hierarchical materials for energy and photonics, and in the development of synchrotron radiation instrumentation for the study of several materials at the nanoscale.