'Living vicariously' has marked Gruner's time at CHESS
June 12th, 2013 ›
By Anne Ju
As
director of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) for not quite 17
years, Sol Gruner takes pride not only in his own science but in the successes
of countless others, which are often the result of techniques and
instrumentation that only CHESS can provide.
On July 1, Gruner will step down as
director of CHESS, continuing as Cornell's John L. Wetherill Professor of
Physics. He will be succeeded by Joel
Brock, professor of applied and engineering physics.
"You
have to learn to live vicariously," said Gruner, 62. "You're enabling other
people to be able to do science, which is fantastic. In some sense that's what
CHESS is all about."
A
National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported user facility, CHESS is a
high-intensity X-ray source that facilitates research in physics, chemistry,
biology and materials science.
Case
in point: Rod MacKinnon of Rockefeller University won the 2003 Nobel Prize in
chemistry for his work on the structure of ion channels. Using a detector that
Gruner's research group built for CHESS, and director's discretionary beam
time, MacKinnon did research in the late 1990s that garnered the Nobel, Gruner
said.
Gruner's
own scientific contributions are many. He and a former graduate student, Chae
Un Kim, Ph.D. '08, developed a technique called pressure freezing that Kim
continues to improve as a staff scientist at MacCHESS, the macromolecular
diffraction facility at CHESS. Gruner will stay on as co-principal investigator
of MacCHESS.
Gruner
is also looking forward to having more time to dedicate to his graduate
students and his physics department lab. His research interests lie in
developing novel instrumentation to uncover the structure and function of
proteins and the development of novel materials.
Looking
back, Gruner notes that a lot of CHESS science blooms from personal
interactions. For instance, a fruitful relationship has formed between art
restorers and X-ray scientists who peer beneath painted-over canvasses with
confocal X-ray microscopy. That collaboration started because Gruner's former
postdoc, Adam Finnefrock, is married to former chemistry Ph.D. student Jennifer
Mass, who is an art restoration expert.
Gruner's
time at CHESS has also been distinguished by change: Around 2000, he led a
major expansion of the G line, with three new beam lines added. In 2006 CHESS
and the Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics merged to form the Cornell
Laboratory for Accelerator-Based Sciences and Education (CLASSE).
Also
throughout Gruner's tenure, many CLASSE researchers undertook experiments,
prototyping and analysis to demonstrate the feasibility of building an Energy
Recovery Linac (ERL) X-ray facility. Started about 12 years ago, the ERL
project would redesign the synchrotron source, extending its capabilities and
that of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) to produce the world's most
powerful X-ray beams.
"We've
had incredible success with the ERL [research and development] program, which
was designed to demonstrate all the key critical technologies to build the
ERL," Brock said. "We have gone significantly beyond what we thought was
possible."
The
ERL project now awaits improvement in the fiscal climate for building new,
large national facilities. In the meantime, a series of upgrades for CHESS and
CESR could be in the facility's near-term future under Brock's leadership.
These would include improvements to beam lines to increase spectral brightness,
and the reconfiguration of the storage ring for optimization of X-ray
production.
"I
am hoping for continued upgrade and transformation of the lab," Brock said.
"Directing the lab over the next couple of years toward new X-ray equipment and
instrumentation I think can really transform the place."
Brock
praised Gruner's leadership of CHESS, which is undergoing its five-year NSF
grant renewal process; the current award finishes in March 2014.
"Sol
has been very good at identifying and attracting really high-quality talent
both in terms of our employees and scientists but also in terms of external
collaborators and people who use the place," Brock said. "When you think about
all the things you want a director to do, from new capital equipment to new
facilities, to hiring great staff and attracting world-class collaborators ...
what else could you possibly imagine? And he did it for 17 years."