FEL Science and Applications Award for Kartik Ayyer

On 7th of September 2016, DESY physicist Kartik Ayyer from CFEL was awarded the “FEL Science and Applications award” of the international “Science@FELs 2016” conference which is currently being held in Trieste, Italy. The Indian researcher works as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the team of Henry Chapman.

The award is given to young researchers on the occasion of the conference and comprises of a certificate, a monetary sum of 1500 Euros and the opportunity to give a presentation of the work at the conference. This year´s prize acknowledges Kartik Ayyer's contributions to the research field of free-electron lasers and its applications. He did his PhD work on X-ray imaging in those cases where the signal is very low as expected for single biomolecule imaging at XFELs. He was also part of the team who recently showed that one can perform diffractive imaging of protein crystals which are not perfectly ordered but show a certain kind of disorder. This novel technique, pioneered by Henry Chapman´s group, will allow researchers to resolve the structure of molecules of great relevance to medicine and biology which are practically inaccessible by existing methods, and at a higher resolution compared to conventional crystallography.