News & Events

  • Aug 2023: Staff crystallographer Diane Dickie presented a poster about teaching X-ray diffraction at the 26th Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr 2023) in Melbourne, Australia.
  • May 2023: We've added two new powder diffractometers to the lab. Check out the NMCF website for more details about our Bruker D2Phaser and Rigaku SmartLab.
  • Dec 2022: The 2023 campus-wide license for the CSD is now available. Contact Diane Dickie (X-ray lab) or Jenny Coffman (Library) if you need a copy of the license.
  • Jun 2021: A paper from the Gunnoe lab featuring 12 crystal structures from our lab made the cover of the June 28 issue of Organometallics.
  • Apr 2021: The final diffractometer has been installed. We now have three single-crystal diffractometers ready to go.
  • Mar 2021: The first of our new diffractometers is here!
  • Mar 2021: Check out the first paper from our lab describing experiments using the single-crystal diffractometer to measure the diffraction of a polycrystalline thin-films instead of single crystals. This collaborative project was led by the Ihelfeld lab from the UVa's Materials Science & Engineering department, and was selected as an "editor's pick" by the journal Applied Physics Letters.
  • Feb 2021: The same Be=N complex from the Gilliard lab that was highlight last month in C&E News was also featured this month in the "Crystallography in the News" section of the Rigaku Oxford Diffraction eNewsletter, and in a blog post from the Cambridge Structural Database. Both items emphasize that this crystal structure shows the shortest Be=N bond ever measured so far.
  • Feb 2021: A collaborative project between our X-ray diffraction lab and Clark University (Worcester MA) is being featured in a special issue of the journal Polyhedron devoted to Undergraduate Research in Inorganic Chemistry.
  • Jan 2021: The Gilliard lab's compound featuring the first ever double bond between nitrogen and a group 2 element and whose structure was determined in our crystallography lab, was highlighted in the Jan 18/25 issue of Chemical and Engineering News.
  • Dec 2020: The Harman lab's neutron diffraction experiment that confirmed the stereo- and regio-selective addition of deuterium atoms to a tungten-coordinated benzene is featured in the downloadable 2021 calendar from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This work, which also featured X-ray diffraction experiments performed in our crystallography lab, was published in earlier this year in Nature. Find a brief description about the experiment here.
  • Dec 2020: The Gilliard lab's beryllium radical cation, whose structure was determined in our crystallography lab, was named as one of 2020's "Molecules of the Year" by Chemical and Engineering News.
  • Dec 2020: Facility crystallographer Diane Dickie has been chosen to serve the American Crystallographic Association as the 2021 Chair-Elect and 2022 Chair of the "Small Molecule" Scientific Interest Group.
  • August 2020: We are excited to announce that an NSF-MRI grant has been awarded to co-PIs Prof. Gilliard, Prof. Gunnoe and Dr. Dickie for the acquisition of a new single-crystal, dual-source X-ray diffractometer. This new addition to the lab should arrive early 2021.