Speaker
Description
John White played an important role at Argonne National Laboratory when the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS) started to operate in the early 1980s. At that time neutron scattering in the US was dominated by physicists, and, as a chemist, John, appointed as a Laboratory Fellow in 1984, was able to talk to many senior scientists at the Laboratory, including the Director, and convince them of the importance of neutrons for a wide range of applications in both chemistry, soft matter, and biology. He strongly advocated building a small-angle scattering machine, a reflectometer, and an inelastic scattering spectrometer to broaden the appeal of neutron scattering across other disciplines, in addition to condensed-matter physics, and we successfully accomplished this goal. John went on to be involved in science, together with ANL collaborators, from all three machines. At that time IPNS was faced with closure in the mid-1980s due to budgetary pressure, but its success across a range of disciplines allowed it to escape this fate, and run until 2008. John's advocacy was a key ingredient in this success.
