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Vice President Candidate: Ashfia Huq

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After a 5-year break (during my tenure in industry), going to Denver to attend ACA meeting last year felt like coming home after a long stay abroad. I feel privileged that my colleagues at this wonderful community have again nominated me to stand for Vice-President of the ACA. I joined ACA in 2006 towards the end of my post-doctoral work at IPNS. Even before joining, I read ACA Reflexions as one of my very first scientific publications as a graduate student was submitted to the transactions of ACA by my thesis advisor Peter Stephens in 2002. During these last two decades, it has been a great experience in engaging with this society, organize sessions at the meetings, present my science, honor the extraordinary scientists from award committees and most of all bonding with colleagues over our love of structural science.

This communities striking uniqueness in my opinion is its ability to attract an extremely diverse group of structural scientists from all race, gender, scientific disciplines and various stages of career. The recent renaming of the society to the structural science society is a perfect example of how the community has broadened its umbrella to embrace all with the scientific interest of understanding structure and dynamics of materials spanning biological, physical, chemical, geological science and more. The techniques used for these studies have also been expanded to include cryo-EM, NMR, Imaging, and other hybrid methods. If elected, I will strive to continue this tradition in making sure we continue to do even better in representation from all walks of structural science.

The large reach of this society in so many disciplines also mean that the members are often torn between attending other scientific meetings and ACA meetings. Membership in various scientific society has generally been in the decline. Price of doing science and gathering for exchange of ideas via meetings is increasing. This has been recognized by several past presidents and the society has made concerted effort to keep the costs low and reaching out to the new generation of scientists entering the field to reinvigorate the community and expand membership. I hope to continue in that tradition and seek opportunities of how we can keep membership dues and meeting attendance cost affordable and still support the staff whose tireless efforts make it all possible.

It has been a great opportunity for me to have the giants of our community as my mentor when I began my scientific career and I am determined to pay it forward. We should continue to celebrate our great 75 years of past activities (shout out to the members who have taken on the charge to ACA history portal) and mentor the future generation. To that effort I will continue to support the expansion of the website to host educational material. I will also work with Canadian (CNC), US (AUC) and Latin American Crystallography associations (LACA) to combine our resources and promote various educational programs such as summer schools, workshops and webinars. The mentor mentee program is another way to welcome young scientists to our family and I hope to work with the YSIG to continue this program.

Finally, US and Canada are jointly hosting the 2026 IUCr meeting which will be a tremendous opportunity to inject and boost enthusiasm for all our members. I hope to help the organizing committee of this meeting in any way I can. This is a great opportunity for us in the America’s to share our scientific contribution in the international arena.

 

Education

  • B.A. Physics and Computer Science, Mount Holyoke College, MA (1996)

  • Ph.D. Physics, SUNY Stony Brook, NY (2003)

  • Post-doctoral Scholar, Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS), Argonne National Lab (2003-2006).

 

Professional Activities

  • Director, Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2025-present) Manager Materials Physics Department, Sandia National Laboratory (2022-2025)

  • Staff and Team lead, Battery Materials Characterization group, Apple Inc. (2019-2022) Staff scientist (2006-2019) and Group leader (2013-2017), Oak Ridge National Laboratory

  • Crystallography related activities:

  • Member ACA since 2006. Organized numerous sessions, and served on Bau (2016) & Warren (2023) prize committee, Powder SIG chair (2009)

  • Member: International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) committee for powder diffraction (2018-2021)

  • Member: US National Committee for Crystallography (USNCCr) (2017-2022)

  • Board of Directors member at large, International Centre for Diffraction Data (2024- 2028)

 

Research Interests

My primary research interest is X-ray and Neutron powder diffraction of chemical and condensed matter systems. I am especially interested in understanding structure property relationships of energy storage materials such as battery & solid oxide fuel cell materials, catalysts etc. under their operational condition. Other materials interests include magnetic and structural properties of strongly correlated electron systems such as superconductivity and geometrically frustrated magnets. I also have extensive expertise in X-ray and Neutron instrumentation design. More recently I have moved into managing scientific research programs and staff, in industry and currently at a national laboratory.