Rigaku School for Practical Crystallography

Fraser White began his career as a crystallographer under the tutelage of Professor Simon Parsons in the Chemistry department at the Univeristy of Edinburgh in 2004. Following completion of his PhD, he stayed at Edinburgh, accepting the position of staff crystallographer tasked with running the departmental X-ray crystallography service. During this time Fraser solved and refined over 1000 structures for a variety of different sample chemistries and gained broad experience in solving crystallographic problems. After several years in this role, Fraser first joined Agilent technologies in 2011 as an applications scientist based in Oxfordshire and remained with the company through the acquisition of Agilent’s single crystal business by Rigaku in 2015. Now in the role of product marketing manager for Rigaku Oxford Diffraction, Fraser is involved in the scientific aspects of single-crystal product marketing.

Dr. Khai-Nghi Truong obtained his PhD in inorganic chemistry and small molecule crystallography at RWTH Aachen University (Germany) in late 2018, working under Prof. Ulli Englert on the synthesis and characterization of metal-organic frameworks. From 2019 to 2022, Khai worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with the renowned Prof. Kari Rissanen at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). He was part of the EU funded Horizon2020 FET Open research and innovation programme INITIO working as an expert in solid-state. His areas of expertise are inorganic and organic small molecule crystallography, supramolecular chemistry as well as materials science. As service crystallographer, chair of the Young Crystallographers of the German Society of Crystallographic (DGK-YC) and German representative of the Young Crystallographers’ European Crystallographic Association (YC-ECA) for several years, Khai has build-up a strong network of collaborators all around the world. He has contributed to more than 60 publications using different diffraction methods, viz. X-ray powder diffraction, single crystal X-ray and neutron diffraction. Khai joined Rigaku Europe SE in mid 2022, working as Application Scientist for both single crystal X-ray and electron diffraction supporting Rigaku’s clients in the EMEA region.

Dr. Christian Schürmann graduated and obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, specializing in chemical crystallography and experimental charge-density research. He joined Rigaku in 2019 and currently serves as Application Team Leader – Single Crystal Diffraction, supporting crystallographic research and applications across the EMEA region.

Earlier in his career, Horst Puschmann was a synthetic inorganic chemist who relied heavily on X-Ray diffraction as an analytical technique. He found some of the crystallographic tools that were available at the time a little trying and moved gradually from complaining about this into actually trying to improve crystallographic software so that it can be used by any everyday chemist. Working in Prof. Judith Howards lab in Durham, Horst met Oleg Dolomanov in around 2004 and Olex2 was born. Oleg and Horst have been developing Olex2 ever since.

After undergraduate studies at the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Robert Bücker obtained a PhD degree in experimental quantum physics from the Vienna University of Technology. In 2013, he joined the department of Prof. Dwayne Miller at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg and the University of Toronto, where he worked on developing novel techniques to visualize the atomic structure and dynamics of beam-sensitive biological specimens using electron diffraction and microscopy. In 2020, he continued this line of research as a postdoc within a shared project between the Technion Israel Institute of Technology (Group of Prof. Meytal Landau) and the Leibniz Institute of Virology (Group of Prof. Kay Grünewald), studying aggregation dynamics and polymorphism of functional amyloid fibrils using cryo-electron microscopy. Returning to diffractive methods, in 2022 he joined Rigaku as product manager for electron diffraction, steering the development of the XtaLAB Synergy-ED, Rigaku’s fully integrated solution for three-dimensional microcrystal electron diffraction (3D ED/MicroED).

Dr. Emilia Buchsteiner studied Geosciences at Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg and completed her PhD in Geoscience at TU Darmstadt under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ute Kolb. Throughout this time, Emilia specialized in electron crystallography, building extensive experience with three-dimensional electron diffraction. Her research has centered on the structural characterization of complex inorganic and mineral crystal structures using advanced electron-diffraction-based methods. In 2023, Emilia joined Rigaku as an Application Scientist, supporting the EMEA region in the fields of single crystal X-ray diffraction and electron diffraction.

Dr. Jakub Wojciechowski is an application scientist working in the Rigaku Europe SE office based in Germany. Before Jakub joined Rigaku, he spent seven years as a crystallographer, research scientist and lecturer at the Łódź University of Technology in, Łódź, Poland. During this period, Jakub regularly collaborated with synthetic chemists, very often providing crucial information for publications, which is absolute structure results. Jakub is now responsible for supporting Rigaku’s clients in the Europe/Middle East/Africa region, helping them with data collection and processing, and also crystal structure publication.

Dr. Christian Göb is working as an application scientist for Rigaku Europe SE. He obtained his doctorate in supramolecular chemistry from the RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and worked as a visiting scientist at the Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University (Japan). His expertise lies in application and characterization of large assemblies like molecular cages, their inclusion compounds and polymers (two-dimensional networks, metal and covalent organic frameworks). His main responsibilities include demonstrations and trainings for users of single crystal diffraction instruments, assistance in crystallographic questions, preparation of publication material and application of the crystalline sponge method in the EMEA region.