People

Current Staff

Simon J. Teat

Staff Scientist

Simon Teat is the staff scientist on Beamline 12.2.1. His research interests include development of synchrotron chemical crystallography stations, development of techniques in synchrotron chemical crystallography, single crystal in-situ gas absorption studies, structure of magnetic coordination compounds, use of anomalous scatter in materials chemistry, variable temperature studies, and phase transition studies.

Laura M^cCormick was born and raised in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. She earned both her BSc(Hons) and PhD from the University of Melbourne under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Brendan Abrahams and Prof. Richard Robson, studying the synthesis and crystallographic characterisation of novel coordination polymers and oligomers. From there, she expanded into using synchrotron and neutron radiation during a postdoc at Monash University with Dr David Turner and Prof. Stuart Batten. At the University of St Andrews for Prof. Russell Morris, she prepared novel coordination frameworks and investigated their capacity to store and release biologically active gases for therapeutic applications. Her research interests at the ALS include in situ dehydration and gas loading of porous coordination polymers, and vacuum induced phase transitions in coordination polymers. She now works for the UK National Crystallogrphy Servive at the University of Southampton.

Christine Beavers was born in Oakland, California and raised in northern California. She earned both her B.S. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis. She was mentored by Prof. Marilyn Olmstead. The focus of her doctorate was crystallography of inorganic compounds, primarily fullerenes. Work with the highly disordered and generally poorly-behaved carbon spheroids gave her a strong grasp of disorder modeling and twin deconvolution, and also lead her to the synchrotron, where she could access the flux she needed. As an ALS Post-Doctoral Fellow and later a Project Scientist, she worked to improve data collection methods on highly disordered systems, and successfully ventured into the world of high-pressure diffraction. She now works for Rigaku America.

Kevin Gagnon was born in Southborough, Massachusetts. He earned a B.S. degree in Chemistry from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in 2008. During his time there he maintained an internship working for American Superconductor Corporation in Devens, MA, and also worked as a student researcher under the supervision of Dr. Venkat Thalladi at WPI. In 2008 he joined the research group of Dr. Abraham Clearfield at Texas A&M University, where he pursued his Ph. D. in Chemistry studying the synthesis of phosphonate materials with an added focus on non-ambient crystallography. After graduating, he joined the ALS as a project scientist on Beamline 11.3.1 in August of 2013 and his main interests include non-ambient crystallography experiments in MOFs, high pressure diffraction of functional materials, thermo- and photoinduced spin-state manipulations of magnetic materials, and resonant anomalous X-ray scattering for site occupancy refinement of mixed-metal systems, among others.

Christine M. Beavers

Kevin J. Gagnon

Jason W. Knight