Invited Speakers

Frank Hawthorne is Canada Research Chair in Crystallography and Mineralogy and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences, University of Manitoba, Canada. His academic interests include topological and electronic aspects of crystal structures, graph-theoretic and combinatorial approaches to crystal structure, the crystal chemistry of rock-forming minerals, short-range order in minerals, diffraction and spectroscopic methods, microbeam analysis, and solution of unknown mineral structures.

Title of talk: Short-Range Order-Disorder in Minerals.

Laurence Galoisy is an associate professor in Mineralogy at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France) where she conducts research at the Institute of Mineralogy, Material Physics and Cosmochemistry (IMPMC). She completed her PhD at the Université Paris - Diderot in 1991and was a post-doctoral fellow at CHIPR/SUNY in Stony Brook (USA) in 1992. From 1993 to 2012, she was associate professor at the Paris-Diderot University (Paris, France). Her research focuses on structure-property relationships in minerals and glasses, using (micro) spectroscopic techniques (optical absorption spectroscopy at high pressure and temperature, x-ray absorption spectroscopy), with interest on geochemical, industrial and archeological applications. She has been Associate Editor of the American Mineralogist. She is a member of Beam Time Allocation Panels at the synchrotron light sources of ESRF (France) and CLS (Canada).

Title of talk: Structural control of the color of minerals and glasses using spectroscopic tools.

Bob Shannon is presently engaged in independent research in Boulder, Colorado and is associated with the University of Colorado. In 1994 he retired from his position as a synthetic chemist for the Du Pont Co. in Wilmington, Delaware. After spending a year as a Humboldt Fellow in Bremen, Germany,  working with Prof. Reinhard Fischer on the optical properties of synthetic oxides and minerals, he has been collecting data for derivation of an empirical set of electronic ion polarizabilities for use in optical studies of minerals.

Title of talk: Empirical electronic polarizabilities for use in refractive index measurements at 589.3 nm.

Giancarlo Della Ventura obtained his PhD in Mineral Synthesis at the University of Orléans (France) in 1992, and was appointed Fellow of MSA in 2007. He is currently Professor of Mineralogy at the University of Roma Tre. He spent several research periods in France, Canada, UK, Germany and USA working mainly on the synthesis and crystal-chemistry of silicates, in particular amphiboles, and systematic mineralogy of rare volcanic minerals, such as Be,B-silicates and U,Th minerals of the roman comagmatic area. Most of his scientific activity is however connected with the FTIR spectroscopy of minerals, and in particular with the development of imaging and high-T techniques.

Topic for the conference: HT-FTIR spectroscopy: problems and applications

Björn Winkler is head of the crystallography/mineralogy group at the Goethe University in Frankfurt a.M. (Germany). He has been awarded the Max-von-Laue Award of the German Crystallographic Society, the Albert-Maucher Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Victor Moritz Goldschmidt Award of the German Mineralogical Society, the European Mineralogical Union Medal for Research excellence and the MSI Academic Award. He is a fellow of the American Mineralogical Society since 1998 and was the Los Alamos National Laboratory "Wheatley Scholar" in 2010/2011. His scientific interest is understanding structure-property relations of inorganic compounds by experiment and theory.

In his conference contribution he will discuss how DFT calculations can be employed to quantitatively interpret Raman, IR, EELS, IXS and INS spectra.

Catherine McCammon is a staff scientist at Bayerisches Geoinstitut, University of Bayreuth. Her research interests extend over the physics and chemistry of minerals and their influence on Earth properties and processes, but she is probably best known for her enthusiasm as a Mössbauer  spectroscopist.

Topic to be presented: Magnetic interactions in minerals.