Beamline staff

Burcu is a BL scientist on I08-SXM

She received her BSc (2012) and MSc (2014) in Chemical Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul. She was awarded a PhD in Chemical Engineering for structure sensitivity of enantioselective surface chemistry on curved Cu(hkl) single crystals from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 2019, working in the Andrew J. Gellman’s group. Following her PhD, she joined the Interface Science and Catalysis Group at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory as a Research Associate in Materials Science in 2019. During her Postdoc (2019-2022), she studied adsorption and catalytic mechanisms on metal oxide surfaces. Also, she developed and tested nanoscale gas cells for solid-gas interface studies to bridge the pressure and materials gap between surface science and real-life conditions under Ashley R. Head and Dario Stacchiola. In March 2022, she joined the Versatile Soft X-ray (VerSoX-B07) Beamline as a Beamline Scientist. During her tenure (2022-2025) at B07 she led research and development in heterogeneous catalysis, focusing on enantioselective hydrogenation reactions using chirally modified metal surfaces and determining the chirality of amino acids using UV Circular Dichroism. As of February 2025, she is a Beamline Scientist at the Scanning X-ray Microscopy Beamline (I08). 

Her expertise is: Heterogeneous catalysis, Surface science, Reaction Kinetics and Mechanism, Chirality, Photoelectron, Absorption and Infrared Spectroscopy.

E-mail: burcu.karagoz@diamond.ac.uk

Luke is a BL scientist on I08-SXM.

.He did his first degree at the University of Kent, then a PhD at the University of Leeds, with Dr B. Mishra as his principal supervisor. He was awarded an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship at Leeds after his PhD. Luke then joined Diamond Light Source as a postdoctoral research associate on the Versatile X-ray Absorption and Emission Spectroscopy beamline (LOLA) I20, working closely with the Prof. Andrew Beale’s group based in the Research Complex at Harwell.  

Luke’s research interest is in sustainable processes for energy and chemicals production, utilising a range of synchrotron X-ray spectroscopies to probe the performance and chemistry of materials. His recent work has utilised XES, XAS and X-ray Raman spectroscopy to probe the behaviour of metal modified zeolite catalysts for the catalytic fast pyrolysis reaction. Luke is interested in combining soft X-ray microscopy and hard X-ray Raman to probe the bulk and surface properties of low-Z materials under in situ and operando conditions.

E-mail: luke.higgins@diamond.ac.uk

Juan is Senior Sample Environment Scientist on I08-SXM

Juan completed his undergraduate study of Biology at the University of Salamanca, Spain in 1998. The two following years he was involved in a post-graduate research project working with fungi called “Purification and Immunochemical Characterization of the ASPND1 Antigen of Aspergillus nidulans”, supervised by Dr. Fernando Leal. In 2003 I changed field and country, and undertook an MRes in Structural Biology at Birkbeck College, London, under the title of “Purification and crystallisation of two catalytic mutants of the mitochondrial Holliday Junction resolvase Ydc2 from Schizosaccharomyces pombe” supervised by Dr. Tracey Barrett.

In 2003 he started his PhD at the University of East Anglia, Norwich under the supervision of Dr. Arthur Oubrie and Prof. David Richardson, and completed it in 2006 with the title “Structural determination of maltose/glucose specificity in sGDH from Acinetobacter calcoaceticus”. Then in 2006 he moved to the EMBL outstation in Grenoble and worked, under the supervision of Florent Cipriani, as a post-doctoral fellow in the development and testing of novel synchrotron instrumentation. This work lead to the development of the HC1, a device that is currently used in numerous macromolecular beamlines and labs around the world.

In early 2008 he moved to Diamond as beamline scientist in I02. He is responsible, with others, for the smooth running of the beamline, including user support and training. He am also involved in my own independent research in structural biology, and responsible for the implementation and commissioning of new equipment and the development of new experimental techniques, to allow users to undertake better science.

From November 2025 on, he started a shared joint appointment between BL VMXi, I08 and I14. His role at I08 and I14 as a Sample Environment Scientist includes the development and integration of functional specimen environments at these two BLs.

Dave is the Senior BL Technician on I08-SXM.

Dave is the Mechanical BL Technician shared between I08 and I14. He recently started to extend his expertise to mechanical design work.