Jamie Schulz, Leader Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Australia
The Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering (ACNS) utilises neutrons from Australia's multi-purpose research reactor, OPAL, to solve complex research and industrial problems for Australian and international users via merit-based access and user-pays programs. Neutron scattering techniques provide the research community and industry with unique tools to study the structure, dynamics and properties of a range of materials, helping scientists understand why materials have the properties they do, and helping tailor new materials.
An overview of the ACNS neutron scattering capabilities at the OPAL reactor will be given including a summary of the neutron detection systems employed on the neutron scattering instruments and a selection of scientific and industry case studies.
Biography
Jamie Schulz is the Leader of the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering (ACNS) at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).
Upon completion of his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2000 he joined the Small-Angle Neutron Scattering group at the NIST Centre for Neutron Research. In 2002 he joined ANSTO as an instrument scientist on the AUSANS instrument at the HIFAR reactor and subsequently in 2005 took up the role of Operations Manager for the Bragg Institute at ANSTO before taking up his current role of the Leader of ACNS in 2016.
Andrew Peele, Director Australian Synchrotron and President Australian Institute of Physics and Professor La Trobe University, Australia
The Australian Synchrotron has been operational for over a decade and in that time has delivered thousands of experiments to over 6,000 registered researchers. Now a part of ANSTO, the facility continues to be one of the most significant investments in scientific infrastructure in Australia.
Research delivered by the Australian Synchrotron is the product of an ideal mix of people, infrastructure and science and provides benefits to our economy, our health and our environment. World-class results from the facility include impacts in human health, including the development of new drugs combatting diseases such as leukaemia, impacts in advanced materials, including new materials for lightweight vehicles and impacts in earth and environmental sciences, including better understanding for mining and development of high-nutrient food.
In this talk Andrew will explain how the Australian Synchrotron operates and will showcase some of the unique capability of the facility in imaging and characterisation. These research tools then allow researchers accessing the facility to work at the forefront of their fields and Andrew will describe some of the high-profile success stories from the facility. These include those in health, materials and environment but also in fields such as cultural heritage where research has included better understanding details of the earliest occupation of Australia as well as details of documents left by the first European explorers.
Biography
Andrew Peele is the Director of the Australian Synchrotron at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Physics at La Trobe University and president of the Australian Institute of Physics.
Andrew's research improves the versatility and quality of x-ray imaging, including new methods in high-resolution and three-dimensional imaging of structured materials ranging from cells to advanced materials.
As Director of the Australian Synchrotron Andrew has led the BRIGHT program, an initiative which, to date, has raised over $80 million in contributions to build new beamlines at the Australian Synchrotron.
Tamara Davis, Professor University of Queensland, Australia
In the eyes of an astrophysicist, the universe is a huge experiment with which to test fundamental physics, and our modern telescopes are giving us an unprecedented view. We can now see the universe as it was only 380,000 years after the big bang, before galaxies even existed. We have found thousands of planets orbiting other stars, and we regularly detect supernovae that went off billions of years before the earth even formed. We've discovered some kind of "dark energy" that is making the expansion of the universe speed up, contrary to our expectation that gravity should slow it down. And we’ve now even detected gravitational waves — ripples in space itself. In this talk you’ll hear about many of the latest exciting developments in modern astrophysics, including Tamara’s work with the Dark Energy Survey, a 5-year project involving almost 500 astrophysicists on 5 continents.
Biography
Professor Tamara Davis is an astrophysicist searching for the elusive “dark energy” that’s accelerating the universe. She’s measured time-dilation in distant supernovae, helped make one of the largest maps of the distribution of galaxies in the universe, and produced evidence of sound waves propagating shortly after the big bang. Her many prizes include the Astronomical Society of Australia's award for the young researcher with the highest international impact, and the Australian Academy of Science’s Nancy Millis medal for female leadership in science.
Paul Lecoq, Senior Physicist, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
The future generation of radiation detectors is more and more demanding on timing performance for a wide range of applications, such as time of flight (TOF) techniques for PET cameras and particle identification in nuclear physics and high energy physics detectors, precise event time tagging in high luminosity accelerators and a number of photonic applications based on single photon detection.
There is in particular a consensus for gathering Europe's multidisciplinary academic and industrial excellence around the ambitious challenge to develop a 10ps TOF PET scanner (TOFPET). The goal is to reduce the radiation dose (currently 5-25 mSv for whole-body PET/CT), scan time (currently > 10 minutes), and costs per patient (currently > 1000 € per scan), all by an order of magnitude, opening molecular imaging procedures to new categories of patients, including pediatric, neonatal and even prenatal examinations. Moreover, such a time resolution will cause a paradigm shift in in-vivo molecular imaging, by enabling on-the-fly image formation and observation of bio-distribution and biochemistry in animals and patients, as well as an order-of-magnitude leap in molecular sensitivity and speed.
To achieve this very ambitious goal it is essential to significantly improve the performance of each component of the detection chain: light production, light transport, photodetection, readout electronics.
It will be shown that the possibility to reach 10ps time-of-flight resolution, even at energies as small as 511keV, although extremely challenging, is not limited by physical barriers and that a number of disruptive technologies, such as multifunctional heterostructures, combining the high stopping power of well know scintillators with the ultrafast photon emission resulting from the 1D, 2D or 3D quantum confinement of the excitons in nanocrystals, photonic crystals, photonic fibers, as well as new concepts of 3D digital SiPM structures, open the way to new radiation detector concepts with unprecedented performance.
Biography
Paul Lecoq received his diploma as Engineer in Physics Instrumentation at the Ecole Polytechnique de Grenoble in 1972, under the leadership of Nobel Laureate Louis Néel. After two years of work at the Nuclear Physics Laboratory of the University of Montreal, Canada, he received his PhD in Nuclear Physics in 1974. Since then he has been working at CERN in 5 major international experiments on particle physics, one of them led by Nobel Laureate Samuel Ting. His action on detector instrumentation, and particularly on heavy inorganic scintillator materials, received strong support from Carlo Rubia and Georges Charpak. He was the technical coordinator of the electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS experiment at CERN, which played an important role in the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Paul Lecoq is the founder of the CERN-based international Crystal Clear collaboration, regrouping 28 institutes and companies worldwide contributing to the development of scintillator science. He has also created the SCINT conference series in 1991, which gathers together the international community working on fundamental aspects, production technologies and applications of scintillators every second year.
As a member of a number of a number of advisory committees and of international Societies, he has since 2002 been the promoter of the CERIMED initiative (European Center for Research Research in Medical Imaging) for networking physics and medicine in the field of medical imaging. He was the initiator and technical coordinator of the European FP7 EndoTOFPET-US project and for the European EUROSTARS TURBOPET project.
He was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2008 and as head of the Physics Division of the Academy in 2017. He has been awarded an Advanced Grant on Time Imaging Calorimetry by the European Research Council in 2013 and was elected IEEE fellow in 2015.
Reinhard Schulte, Professor, Loma Linda University, United States
Radiation therapy plays a major role in the cure of cancer. Yet, a significant number of malignant tumors remain incurable because they are inherently radioresistant. While protons offer a dose-sparing advantage of photons, which are still the most common form of external radiation used in therapy, ions heavier than protons also have a radiobiological advantage. There are many challenges remaining, however, that have prevented protons and, in particular, ions becoming mainstream in local cancer therapy with radiation. The main focus of Reinhard’s talk is the need for advanced imaging technology to take advantage of the most compelling reason we use these particles: the Bragg peak, which should be placed with the highest possible accuracy in order to deliver the therapeutic dose as planned. Once we are capable of doing this despite prevailing uncertainties in patient position and tumor location, we can start exploring other technological options such as dose painting of hypoxic regions and ultra-short fractionation schedules. The benefits of using advanced technology have already shown promising results in photon therapy mostly by reducing side effects. In ion therapy, the benefit will be two-fold: maximum sparing of normal tissues will be combined with intensified therapy of radioresistant cancer stem cells, thus, ultimately, saving lives.
Biography
Professor Reinhard Schulte is a physicist and radiation oncologist who has been devoting his activities to developing advanced imaging and treatment techniques for proton and ion therapy. After spending 20 years in the James M. Slater MD Proton Treatment Center at Loma Linda University Medical Center, his became one of the Principal Investigators of a Planning Grant for Ion Therapy Research awarded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute with the goal to integrate new technology with radiobiology in collaboration with existing and upcoming ion beam therapy centers throughout the world.
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