Angela Altomare is Research Director at the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council (CNR) of Italy, in Bari. Her research activity, carried out over more than 30 years, is mainly devoted to the development and application of advanced crystallographic methodologies and computational tools for the structural characterization of crystalline compounds, from single crystal and microcrystalline powder diffraction data. Angela has been President of the Italian Crystallographic Association-AIC (2021-2023), she is a member of the Executive Committee of the IUCr, a member of the Commission for the participation of CNR to the IUCr, Section Editor of Acta Crystallographica Section A: Advances and Foundations, a member of the European Powder Diffraction Conference Committee, a member of the European Crystallographic Association. She has earned the 2019 ‘Mario Mammi’ Award of the AIC. She chaired the 15th European Powder Diffraction Conference (EPDIC15), Bari, Italy, 12-15 June 2016. She has chaired and participated in several conferences and schools, as well as she has served as a program committee member for several meetings. She has published more than 150 papers in scholarly journals and 10 chapters of books, including two chapters in the ‘International Tables for Crystallography Volume H: Powder Diffraction’. Angela is a co-author of twelve crystallographic computing programs worldwide used. Her articles have gained a number of citations greater than 28000.

Paula Abdala obtained her diploma in chemical engineering at the National Technological University, Mendoza, Argentina (2002). She earned her PhD in material science from the University of San Martin, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2010), studying structure–performance relationships in materials for solid oxide fuel cells. She then moved to Grenoble, France, where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. She joined Prof. Christoph Müller's group at the ETH Zurich (D-MAVT), Switzerland in 2014 where she is currently employed as a senior scientist. The goal of her research is to elucidate the principles that can guide the design of new efficient materials for sustainable processes, including heterogeneous catalysts and sorbents for carbon dioxide capture. Aiming at understanding in depth the relationships between the atomic-scale structure and properties of functional materials, she works with operando synchrotron and laboratory-based X-ray techniques to unveil the structure of materials at different length and time scales. Her expertise lies in the use of operando X-ray powder diffraction, total scattering, and X-ray absorption spectroscopy. She has published 80 articles in scholarly journals, supervised or co-supervised 8 PhD students and participated in several scientific projects as a researcher, principal investigator (PI) or co-PI. She is a board member of the Swiss Society for Crystallography.

Prof. Billinge has more than 25 years of experience developing and applying techniques to study local structure in materials using x-ray, neutron and electron diffraction including the development of novel data analysis methods including graph theoretic, artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches.
He earned his Ph.D in Materials Science and Engineering from University of Pennsylvania in 1992. After 13 years as a faculty member at Michigan State University, in 2008 he took up his current position as Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University and held a joint position of Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory between 2008 and 2022.

Dr. N. Casati received his PhD in Structural Chemistry in 2005 from the University of Milan. He formed his expertise in Synchrotron radiation during a postdoc at Diamond Light Source, at the I15 Extreme Conditions beamline.
In 2012 he became scientist at the Materials Science beamline of the Swiss Light Source, where he became a group leader in 2018.
Beside the management and technical development of the beamline stations his scientific interests are in mechanically driven chemistry, spanning from high pressure modifications of materials to mechanochemical synthesis. He also supports the successful industrial program of the beamline, which delivers results to industrial partner for more than 10% of the user’s time.

Bill David is STFC Senior Fellow at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Professor of Energy Materials Chemistry in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford and a Fellow in Physics at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. Bill is a Fellow of Royal Society, the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry, and an Honorary Life Member of the British Crystallography Association.
Bill’s research is based around renewable energy centring on the research, development, demonstration, and the advocacy of sustainable and affordable zero-carbon energy chemical (ammonia with a focus on catalysis) and electrochemical (high power-density sodium-ion batteries) storage systems.
Bill’s research is built upon his developments of powder diffraction where he has contributed to a number of experimental, computational and theoretical aspects throughout his career. These have included new methods for determining the crystal structures of pharmaceutical compounds and past highlights that have included early work on lithium battery cathode materials and the discovery of the crystal structures of the first liquid-nitrogen high-temperature superconductor and C60, buckminsterfullerene. His current crystallographic interests lie in the combined use of powder diffraction techniques with first-principles computational simulations to provide accurate insights into the atomic-scale behaviour of sodium-ion battery cathode materials and ammonia synthesis and decomposition catalysts.

Miguel Delgado is a Professor of Chemistry at Universidad de Los Andes (ULA) in Merida, Venezuela, where he has been a member of the Crystallography Laboratory for over 40 years. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Materials Science at MIT in 1988. He has published over 90 papers in the area of characterization of materials using single-crystal and powder diffraction techniques. For over 20 years, he has been one of the editors of the Powder Diffraction Journal. He has had a long-time association with the International Centre for Diffraction Data (ICDD), participating in different committees and in its Board of Directors. Professor Delgado has been involved in the organization of many congresses, schools, and workshops throughout the years in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has also participated as lecturer and instructor in many academic events. Currently, he is the President of the Latin American Crystallographic Association (LACA).

1984-1993 Studies of Mineralogy and Crystallography at the university of Heidelberg. Scholarship holder of the “German National Academic Foundation”. Ph.D. (summa cum laude)
1993-1995 'Post-Doc' at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory in connection with the Department of Physics at SUNY Stony Brook
1995-2000 Assistant professorship (C1) at the Laboratory of Crystallography at Bayreuth University. Habilitation and venia legendi (Privatdozent) in Crystallography 1998 EPDIC award
2001 Associate professor (C2) at university of Bayreuth
2001- Tenured staff position (group leader) of the scientific facility diffraction at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research at Stuttgart
2001-2007 Privat-Dozent for crystallography at the institute for geo- and bio-sciences of the university of Stuttgart
2002-2005 Chairman of the Commission on Powder Diffraction (CPD) of the IUCr
2007- Appointment as Honorary Professor at the geoscience department at the university of Tübingen and as adjunct (ausserplanmäßiger) Professor at the chemistry department at the university of Stuttgart
2016- Appointment as director at large/chair of the technical committee at international Centre for Diffraction data (ICDD) in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania.
2020 Will-Kleber-Gedenkmünze (coin) for outstanding efforts in crystallography and the education of young scientists

John Evans is a Professor of Solid State Chemistry at Durham University, and was Head of Department from2009 to 2014. His research interests are in the synthesis and properties of (mainly) inorganic materials, their structural chemistry, and their real-world applications. He has worked, inter alia, on negative thermal expansion, symmetry properties of phase transitions, new oxychalcogenides, and energy-related materials, often using in-situ or operando powder diffraction methods. He has a long-standing interest in developing and applying powder diffraction methods, maintains the jEdit interface to the TOPAS Rietveld software, and distributes Rietveld training packages used by 1000s of researchers worldwide (e.g. via https://topas.awh.durham.ac.uk/, https://topas.awh.durham.ac.uk/flarum/public/ and YouTube @johnevansstructuralscience4018). He is co-author of a 2018 textbook on Rietveld Refinement and a 2021 textbook on “Solid State Materials Chemistry”. He has worked closely with several synchrotron and neutron facilities around the world.

Andy Fitch obtained his doctorat at the Department of Inorganic Chemistry, Oxford, under Brian Fender. Here he was first introduced to Rietveld refinement, using powder neutron diffraction data. After 5 years spent at the ILL in Grenoble he joined Keele University as a lecturer in physical and inorganic chemistry and joint appointment with the SRS Daresbury, where he was involved with the development of the powder diffraction program using synchrotron radiation. He returned to Grenoble, to the ESRF, where he is responsible for the high resolution powder diffraction beamline, originally built at BM16, rebuilt at ID31, and now operating at ID22. His research intesests are in powder crystallography, particularly organic systems. He was secretary of the IUCr commission on powder diffraction from 1999 to 2008, and has been a member of the EPDIC committee since 1998. He is a co-editor for IUCrJ.

• M.S. in Physics, Università degli Studi, Bari, Italy
• Ph.D. in Physics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
• Postdoctoral fellow, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, Berkeley, California, USA
• Research scientist, Intel Corp., Santa Clara, California, USA
• Project Leader of the spin-off company "Swiss Light Source Techno-Trans AG", Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland
• Senior Researcher and beamline scientist, Swiss Light Source, Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland
• CEO and Founder of Excelsus Structural Solutions
Dr Gozzo has more than 30 years of practical experience with synchrotron facilities, in developing complex instrumentation and using it for the study of pharmaceuticals, pigments, food components, concrete and semiconductors. At the Paul Scherrer Institute, she has contributed to the growth of the Swiss Light Source synchrotron facility where she has developed for more than 10 years a state-of-the-art powder diffractometer, acknowledged in several scientific publications as one of the best ones in the world. Dr Gozzo has built there a substantial industrial and academic user community, including some large pharmaceutical companies. She is recognized as a synchrotron- and powder diffraction expert and as such, is regularly invited at the international level as a speaker, lecturer and scientific advisor. She is the author and co-author of more than 80 scientific articles and book chapters.

Ivan Halasz obtained his PhD with Prof. Hrvoj Vančik in 2008 from the University of Zagreb. Following a two-year post-doc with Prof. Robert Dinnebier at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid state Research in Stuttgart, he joined as a faculty at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb, where he now holds the position of a senior scientist. His research interests are focused on the solid state and encompass solid-state reactions, mechanochemistry, in situ methodology, powder X-ray diffraction and structural characterisation. He published over 100 research papers, two book chapters, and coauthored two high-school chemistry textbooks. In 2016, he received the State Science Award of the Republic of Croatia for his contributions in developing in situ methods for the study of mechanochemical reactions.

Mads Ry Jørgensen is senior scientist at Aarhus University as well as being beamline manager for the DanMAX materials science beamline at the MAX IV Laboratory. Mads obtained his PhD in nanoscience in 2012 studying the electron densities of magnetic coordination polymers. During this work he worked on developing instrumentation for accurate and high-resolution single crystal diffraction using both synchrotron and laboratory X-ray sources. Following this he moved to the Spallation Neutron Source at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he joined the team at the TOPAZ single crystal instrument as a postdoc. Here he focused on optimizing the data quality to obtain the most accurate atomic displacement parameters. Upon returning to Denmark he started working on the conceptual design for the DanMAX materials science beamline. He has since lead the beamline project delivering the beamline into user operation at the 3GeV MAX IV synchrotron storage ring. Mads’ research interest is both in developing in-situ and in-operando diffraction and scattering experiments and the structure-property relationship in piezoelectrics.

Ute Kolb, educated as chemist, started her PhD in 1994 at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. In her scientific work she focused on the analysis of scattering in a variety of fields such as photon correlation spectroscopy, X-ray scattering on single crystals and powder and finally electron crystallography. In 1997 she started her habilitation with the aim to develop a reliable method for structure analysis using electron diffraction. Since 2001 she is responsible for the "Centre for high resolution electron microscopy Mainz" (EMZ-M) at the University of Mainz and since 2012 she is additionally appointed as Professor for Electron Crystallography in Darmstadt. In 2007 the method for automated diffraction tomography (ADT) could be applied the first time to solve "ab initio" crystal structures from nano particles by electron diffraction. Nowadays, the field of three dimensional electron diffraction is rapidly growing and thus she was granted 2021 the Gjonnes medal from the CEC together with Sven Hovmöller. Throughout the years she was active for different associations like ECA(SIG4), IUCr(CEC) and she is now chair of the National Committee of the DGK. Additionally, she is teaching in international courses and organized Schools on Electron Crystallography like in 2011 in Erice and 2014 in Darmstadt.

Lynne McCusker has been performing crystal structure analyses using X-ray powder diffraction (XPD) data for over 40 years. She first learned the intricacies of Rietveld refinement from Christian Baerlocher during a postdoc at ETH Zurich in the early 1980s. Then, as instrumental and computational capabilities developed, they both started exploring the possibility of using powder diffraction data to solve, not just refine, crystal structures. This eventually led to the formation of a joint research group at ETH devoted to developing methodology to solve the crystal structures of polycrystalline materials. Initially, the emphasis was on zeolite structures, but that was later expanded to include other compounds. The approaches developed ranged from improving the estimated intensities of overlapping reflections via calculation or experiment, using real-space information to help compensate for the reflection overlap problem, adapting the charge-flipping algorithm to work with XPD data, combining XPD with other techniques (specifically electron diffraction, electron microscopy and MAS NMR spectroscopy) to address more difficult problems, and exploring the possibilities offered by microdiffraction using the Laue technique or X-FEL. This work was recognized with the Breck Award (2010) and the IZA Award (2013) from the International Zeolite Association, the Edith Flanigen Award (2013) from Honeywell UOP, and an honorary doctorate in natural science from Stockholm University (2014).

Jonas Nyman was born in Sweden, and after having obtained BSc and MSc degrees in chemical engineering and biotechnology, he switched to computational chemistry, earning a PhD in Southampton. His research was focused on crystal structure prediction (CSP) and modelling thermal effects in molecular crystals. He then did a postdoc at Eli-Lilly in Indianapolis, before starting his own consulting business. He is currently a Research and Applications Scientist at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, focusing on CSP and related computational techniques, including PXRD analysis

Daniel Olds is a beamline scientist on the Pair-Distribution Function (PDF) beamline and the scientific lead on the new High-Resolution Diffraction (HRD) beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His research focuses on developing real-time AI-driven analysis during in situ and high throughput studies of complex materials to discover the underlying atomic origins of the relevant material properties such as reaction pathways, synthesis, decomposition mechanisms, phase-transitions, and material passivation/poisoning. By leveraging advanced computational methods in both the data analysis and experimental control, he hopes to both accelerate the pace of discovery and expand access to a broader community of light source users.

Dr Lucy Saunders is an early career researcher at Diamond Light Source on the High Resolution Powder X-ray Diffraction beamline, I11. Lucy is a diffraction-oriented chemist with expertise in synchrotron science and in situ methods combining these with spectroscopic techniques to unlock some of the most comprehensive understandings to date of the nature of proton transfer in organic molecular crystals. Lucy started her career in diffraction during a university placement (2009/2010) at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France working on the High Resolution Powder X-ray Diffraction beamline ID31 (now ID22) under the supervision of Prof. Andy Fitch. Enjoying crystallography and research at large scale facilities, Lucy undertook a PhD jointly funded by the University of Bath and Diamond Light Source working in small molecule single crystallography on I19 under the supervisions of Profs Chick Wilson, Paul Raithby (Bath) and Dr Harriot Nowell (Diamond). Following her PhD, Lucy joined beamline I19 at Diamond for a postdoctoral position (April 2017 to April 2021) where she continued to focus on molecular proton transfer systems and designed an in situ electric field crystallography set up in collaboration with Hamish Yeung, at the University of Birmingham, UK. It was during this post that Lucy attended her first ever Erice School, being a participant of the Quantum Crystallography school in June 2018. In her current role as a beamline scientist on I11 (June 2021 to present), Lucy supports the user community on beamline visits whilst continuing her research. In recognition of her achievements in chemical crystallography, Lucy was awarded the CCDC Chemical Crystallography Prize for Younger Scientists in April 2023 and gave the prize lecture during the British Crystallographic Spring Meeting in Sheffield, UK.

Maxwell Terban is a scientist in the X-ray Diffraction group of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. Previously, he graduated from UMass Amherst in 2012 with a B.S. in chemical engineering, then earned a Ph.D. in materials science from Columbia University in New York City in 2018. His research focuses on materials structure characterization through x-ray scattering techniques, and his interests include the study of formation and structure−property relationships of functional materials including nanomaterials, polymers, small molecules, and microporous compounds.

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Gavin Vaughan earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993 working on low dimensional crystal systems (liquid and plastic crystals) before moving to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility where he was first a post-doc and then a beamline scientist. His current research centers on the development of diffraction tomographic methods and techniques for multi-crystal crystallography for simultaneous hierarchical characterization of multi-scale systems, total scattering studies on poorly crystalline systems, and studies of fast in-situ chemical reactions and phase changes, in particular as pertains to materials associated with the energy economy. He is active in the development of experimental methods for X-ray synchrotron beamlines and methods for data reduction of multidimensional data and in the development of micro- and nano-beams for crystallography, in the use of total scattering for the study of local structure, and for the application of tomographic methods to crystallography in solid state chemistry and materials science research. Vaughan has led or been involved in the design and construction of 3 different beamlines at the ESRF over the last 25 years. HE is author or co-author of over 250 refereed publications.