Plenary Speakers

Monday, June 6
9:10 am – 9:45 am

Laura Greene
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University

Laura Greene has been appointed by President Biden to serve on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Greene is the chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory located at Florida State University, the University of Florida, and Los Alamos National Laboratory; and a member of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) Scientific Advisory Committee.

Greene is a widely respected researcher on quantum materials and the mechanisms of unconventional superconductivity. She has held leadership roles in many of the nation's most prestigious science organizations, including president of the American Physical Society (APS) and a member of the Board of Directors for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  Greene also is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Physics, and the APS.  She has been awarded the E.O. Lawrence Award for Materials Research from the U.S. Department of Energy, the APS Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award and the Bellcore Award of Excellence.

Tuesday, June 7
9:10 am – 9:45 am

Susan Krueger
National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Neutron Research

Susan Krueger has been a research physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) for more than 30 years, with her main research focus in the area of biophysics using neutron scattering to study the structure and function of biological macromolecules in solution. She has been particularly interested in the contrast variation technique applied to biological complexes with two or more components, which allows the structure of the individual components to be determined as they exist in the complex. During her time at the NCNR, she has developed instrumentation, sample environments and software for neutron reflectivity and small-angle neutron scattering (SANS). She has recently been involved in the development of the SASSIE-web software aimed at helping biology researchers plan and execute SANS experiments as well as use current molecular dynamics methods to develop all-atom model structures that are consistent with their data.

Wednesday, June 8
9:10 am – 9:45 am

Bruce Gaulin
Department of Physics & Astronomy, McMaster University

Bruce Gaulin is an experimental condensed matter physicist working in the general area of scattering studies of exotic ground states in new, mostly magnetic, materials. His team (grad students, postdocs, collaborators and himself) make new materials which they think will have interesting and exotic ground states, and then take these materials to forefront neutron and x-ray scattering facilities in North America and around the world. They perform scattering experiments on these new materials and then work either independently or with friends in theory to interpret the experiments, and thereby shed light on the exotic properties of the new materials.

Thursday, June 9
8:55 am – 9:30 am

Jeremy Smith
University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory 

Jeremy C. Smith has led research groups in France, Germany and the United States. After education at University of Leeds and London University in 1985 he became a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer with Nobel Laureate Martin Karplus at Harvard University. In 1989, he established a biomolecular simulation group at the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique in Saclay, near Paris. In 1998, he became Chair of Computational Molecular Biophysics at the University of Heidelberg, and in 2006 became the first University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Governor’s Chair and also Founding Director of the ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics, which currently encompasses seven research groups. In 2008 he was named Honorary Professor of the University of Heidelberg. He received the ORNL Director’s Award for Individual Achievement in 2017.

Smith’s research interests include the high-performance computer simulation of biological macromolecules, supercomputing, bioenergy, environmental biogeochemistry, drug and vaccine design and biological neutron scattering. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed scientific articles. 117 people have worked in his research groups, including 17 staff, 40 postdocs, 43 graduate students and 8 long-term visitors. 40 former group members have moved on to university faculty positions, 11 are national laboratory staff scientists and 14 work in industry.