Alan Soper | |
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 Alan Soper at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2014 | |
| Born | Alan Kenneth Soper 15 June 1951 [1] Romford, Essex |
| Alma mater | University of Leicester (BSc, PhD) |
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| Scientific career | |
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| Thesis | The Structure of Aqueous Solutions (1977) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Enderby [4] |
| Website | isis |
Alan Kenneth Soper (born 1951) [1] FRS [5] is an STFC Senior Fellow at the ISIS neutron source based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. [6]
Soper was educated at The Campion School [1] and the University of Leicester where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1973 followed by a PhD in 1977 for research into the structure of aqueous solutions conducted at the Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble supervised by John Enderby. [4]
Before moving to RAL in 1997, Soper was a postdoctoral researcher and assistant professor in the Physics Department at the University of Guelph, Ontario in Canada and a staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico in the United States. [1]
Soper's research investigates molecular-level structures in structurally disordered systems. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] Soper was chair of the prestigious Gordon Research Conference on Water and Aqueous Solutions in 2008 and is the co-designer of the Near and InterMediate Range Order Diffractometer (NIMROD) instrument [20] [21] [22] [23] on the ISIS neutron source.
Soper is a world expert in the structure of water and water-based solutions at the molecular level. Using experimental techniques such as neutron and X-ray diffraction, combined with computer simulation and structure refinement, Soper investigates the organisation and behaviour of water molecules, including their interaction with other molecules and surfaces. His work has relevance given the importance of water in the biochemical processes of living organisms. [5]
He has characterised the structure of water under extreme conditions – as found miles down at the bottom of the ocean – and in heavily confined water such as occurs in nanoscopic mineral cavities. He has observed that this water is likely to be under significant tension – about −1000 atmospheres. [5]
Soper was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. [5] His nomination reads:
Alan Soper is distinguished as the world leading experimentalist on the structure of water and aqueous solutions, and an internationally outstanding expert on the structure of liquids in general. Besides making major and seminal contributions to the study of water and other aqueous systems, including complex systems of high chemical and biological importance, he has been influential in studies of many other liquids and glasses, and has developed novel diffraction instruments and techniques that have revolutionised the field. He has also pioneered the wider use of computer simulation as a tool for building three-dimensional models of the disordered states of matter based on measured data. [2]
Soper was made an ISIS neutron source senior research fellow in 2009. [24]
Selenocysteine is the 21st proteinogenic amino acid. Selenoproteins contain selenocysteine residues. Selenocysteine is an analogue of the more common cysteine with selenium in place of the sulfur.
Carbonic acid is a chemical compound with the chemical formula H2CO3. The molecule rapidly converts to water and carbon dioxide in the presence of water. However, in the absence of water, it is quite stable at room temperature. The interconversion of carbon dioxide and carbonic acid is related to the breathing cycle of animals and the acidification of natural waters.
Protein folding is the physical process by which a protein, after synthesis by a ribosome as a linear chain of amino acids, changes from an unstable random coil into a more ordered three-dimensional structure. This structure permits the protein to become biologically functional.
In physics, the phase problem is the problem of loss of information concerning the phase that can occur when making a physical measurement. The name comes from the field of X-ray crystallography, where the phase problem has to be solved for the determination of a structure from diffraction data. The phase problem is also met in the fields of imaging and signal processing. Various approaches of phase retrieval have been developed over the years.
Martin Julian Buerger was an American crystallographer. He was a Professor of Mineralogy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He invented the X-ray precession camera for studies in crystallography. Buerger authored twelve textbooks/monographs and over 200 technical articles. He was awarded the Arthur L. Day Medal by the Geological Society of America in 1951. The mineral fluor-buergerite was named for him. The MJ Buerger Award was established in his honor.
Guanidine is the compound with the formula HNC(NH2)2. It is a colourless solid that dissolves in polar solvents. It is a strong base that is used in the production of plastics and explosives. It is found in urine predominantly in patients experiencing renal failure. A guanidine moiety also appears in larger organic molecules, including on the side chain of arginine.
Powder diffraction is a scientific technique using X-ray, neutron, or electron diffraction on powder or microcrystalline samples for structural characterization of materials. An instrument dedicated to performing such powder measurements is called a powder diffractometer.
An acoustic interferometer is an instrument that uses interferometry to measure the physical characteristics of sound waves in a gas or liquid. It may be used to measure velocity, wavelength, absorption, or impedance of the sound waves. The principle of operation is that a vibrating crystal creates ultrasonic waves that are radiated into the medium being analyzed. The waves strike a reflector placed parallel to the crystal. The waves are then reflected back to the source and measured.
Xenon tetrafluoride is a chemical compound with chemical formula XeF
4. It was the first discovered binary compound of a noble gas. It is produced by the chemical reaction of xenon with fluorine:
The ISIS Neutron and Muon Source is a pulsed neutron and muon source, established 1984 at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. It uses the techniques of muon spectroscopy and neutron scattering to probe the structure and dynamics of condensed matter on a microscopic scale ranging from the subatomic to the macromolecular.
Molecular models of DNA structures are representations of the molecular geometry and topology of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules using one of several means, with the aim of simplifying and presenting the essential, physical and chemical, properties of DNA molecular structures either in vivo or in vitro. These representations include closely packed spheres made of plastic, metal wires for skeletal models, graphic computations and animations by computers, artistic rendering. Computer molecular models also allow animations and molecular dynamics simulations that are very important for understanding how DNA functions in vivo.
In molecular biology, proteins are generally thought to adopt unique structures determined by their amino acid sequences. However, proteins are not strictly static objects, but rather populate ensembles of conformations. Transitions between these states occur on a variety of length scales and time scales , and have been linked to functionally relevant phenomena such as allosteric signaling and enzyme catalysis.
An ice nucleus, also known as an ice nucleating particle (INP), is a particle which acts as the nucleus for the formation of an ice crystal in the atmosphere.
Sir John Edwin Enderby was a British physicist, and was Professor of Physics at University of Bristol from 1976 to 1996. He developed innovative ways of using neutrons to study matter at the microscopic level. His research has particularly advanced our understanding of the structure of multicomponent liquids— those made up of two or more types of atoms – including commonly used liquid alloys and glasses.
Ernest Omar Wollan was an American physicist who made major contributions in the fields of neutron scattering and health physics.
Randy John Read is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and professor of protein crystallography at the University of Cambridge.
Raymond Ethan Goldstein FRS FInstP is the Alan Turing Professor of Complex Physical Systems in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Biman Bagchi is an Indian scientist currently serving as a SERB-DST National Science Chair Professor and Honorary Professor at the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit of the Indian Institute of Science. He is a theoretical physical chemist and biophysicist known for his research in the area of statistical mechanics; particularly in the study of phase transition and nucleation, solvation dynamics, mode-coupling theory of electrolyte transport, dynamics of biological macromolecules, protein folding, enzyme kinetics, supercooled liquids and protein hydration layer. He is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences, The World Academy of Sciences and an International honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Along with several scientific articles, he has authored three books, (i) Molecular Relaxation in Liquids, (ii) Water in Biological and Chemical Processes: From Structure and Dynamics to Function, and (iii) Statistical Mechanics for Chemistry and Materials Science.
A neutron may pass by a nucleus with a probability determined by the nuclear interaction distance, or be absorbed, or undergo scattering that may be either coherent or incoherent. The interference effects in coherent scattering can be computed via the coherent scattering length of neutrons, being proportional to the amplitude of the spherical scattered waves according to Huygens–Fresnel theory. This scattering length varies by isotope in a way that appears random, whereas the X-ray scattering length is just the product of atomic number and Thomson scattering length, thus monotonically increasing with atomic number.
Vanessa K. Peterson is a Neutron Instrument Scientist, at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). She established an independent research program at ANSTO which specialised on improving understanding of energy systems and how they work. She manages the Echidna program, a high-resolution powder diffractometer, as well as Wombat - a high-intensity powder diffractometer. Peterson's expertise includes synchtron and laboratory x-ray techniques, as well as neutron powder diffraction, as well as single crystal x-ray diffraction.
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