Physical Biosciences Division                                                                     One Stop

Paul Adams is stepping down as Head of the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BCSB) after 7 years of leadership. The BCSB is a national user facility that operates five macromolecular crystallography beamlines at the Advanced Light Source, and hosts over 100 industrial and academic research groups each year.

In addition to his duties as PBD Deputy Division Director, Paul will be focusing his efforts on two new roles - ALS Division Deputy for Biosciences and Chair of the ALS Biosciences Council. During his tenure as Head of the BCSB, he has overseen performance upgrades to all of the BCSB beamlines, supported by $8M obtained from LBNL, industrial and academic participating research team members, the Department of Energy, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. These upgrades have resulted in greatly improved X-ray flux for the beamlines and automated hardware and software that have enabled remote access for many of the BCSB users. The Division thanks Paul for his excellent leadership and looks forward to his continued efforts supporting biosciences both within PBD and at the Advanced Light Source.

 

Nicholas Sauter, a computer staff scientist at Berkeley Lab, has been appointed as Acting Head of the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BCSB) by Physical Biosciences Division Director Adam Arkin, effective immediately.

Sauter has been serving as staff scientist since 2008, after coming to the Lab in 2000 as a research scientist.

After receiving his A.B. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from Harvard University, Sauter spent seven years at the University of California, San Francisco, first as a postdoctoral fellow with the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Foundation, and then as a research specialist in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 1999, he became a research associate at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, participating in the development of BLU-ICE, a highly-regarded software system that greatly facilitates the operation of crystallography beamlines worldwide.

Sauter’s research focuses on the development of new computational methods that address problems in structural biology. His image processing program LABELIT, is widely used at light sources to automatically interpret diffraction images. He has current NIH funding to implement new software for the latest generation of ultrafast X‑ray detectors. He is also part of a Berkeley Lab collaboration that is mapping out the catalytic mechanism used by green plants to convert sunlight to fuel. This effort, which uses powerful femtosecond X-ray pulses at the Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC, is aimed at the eventual production of energy through artificial photosynthesis.

For more information about Nicholas Sauter, visit his group's software development website, the Computational Crystallography Initiative (CCI),  or the BCSB website.