Canadian researchers receive honourable mentions in X-ray diffraction scholarship annnouncement

Boston, MA – Honourable mentions were made to Matt Izawa of the University of Western Ontario and Svetlana Neretina of McMaster University at the recent announcement of Bruker AXS’ 2006 Excellence in X-ray diffraction (XRD) scholarships.

Matt Izawa, who was advised by associate professors Penelope King and Roberta Flemming, was cited for his research paper on the Tagish Lake carbonaceous chondrite using X-ray microdiffraction. Svetlana Neretina, who is supervised by Dr Peter Mascher with Dr James Britten providing expertise in crystallography, was cited for her research paper on the role of lattice mismatch in the deposition of CdTe thin films.

Recognizing academic achievement in X-ray diffraction, Bruker AXS presented a $5,000 scholarship for unique applications in the category of materials science and another $5,000 scholarship for the category of geology and chemistry.

Hsiu-Wen Wang of the Indiana University department of geological sciences, Bloomington was awarded the $5,000 scholarship for unique applications in the category of geology and chemistry. The title of her winning paper is “Dehydration/Rehydration Induced Phase Transitions in Natrolite.”

Graduate student (PhD) Christian Long of the department of materials science and engineering and center for superconductivity research, department of physics at the University of Maryland was awarded the $5,000 scholarship again this year for unique applications in the category of materials science. His paper is entitled “Rapid Structural Mapping of the Ternary Metallic Alloy Systems Using the Combinatorial Approach and Cluster Analysis.”

The winners were selected by an independent panel of judges: Dr Tom Blanton from Eastman Kodak, Dr Jim Kaduk from Innovene and president of the International Centre for Diffraction Data, Professor Richard Matyi, College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at UAlbany-SUNY, National Research Council Canada research officer Dr Pam Whitfield, associate professor Scott Misture from Alfred University in New York, and Dr Nattamai Bhuvanesh, department of chemistry at Texas A&M University.