Grant Bunker, chair and professor of physics, and Carlo Segre, Duchossois Leadership Professor of Physics, welcomed 35 international and domestic graduate students to IIT Main Campus for the annual APS/IIT XAFS Summer School, held July 7-11, 2014. The school is a collaboration between Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source and the IIT physics department, and has been offered at IIT since 2010.

X-ray Absorption Fine Structure Spectroscopy (XAFS) is an X-ray technique that allows researchers to learn precise structural information about materials at the molecular level. The XAFS school covered theory, experimental methods and design, sample preparation, and data analysis of this technique, and included a day of XAFS measurements at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source using six different XAFS beamlines. Bunker and Segre gave lectures alongside other experts from IIT, Argonne, University of Notre Dame, and University of Chicago.

The XAFS school was attended by a diverse group of graduate students, postdocs, research scientists, and professors. More than half of the participants came from outside the U.S., traveling from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Poland, Spain, and Sweden to attend the course. Domestic participants traveled from states as far away as Alaska and Alabama, and as near as Argonne.