GM/CA Admin

The Administration Core supports GM/CA@APS activities to operate and continually improve a resource for macromolecular crystallography of challenging biomedical problems at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. The Administrative Core is led by GM/CA Group Leader Robert Fischetti (contact PI); he leads the User Support section within GM/CA, supervises six of the GM/CA staff, and keeps GM/CA abreast of technical advances. Scientific Director Dr. Janet Smith (University of Michigan, PI) keeps GM/CA abreast of current needs and challenges in structural biology and travels to Argonne periodically. The GM/CA staff are highly experienced and qualified to run the user program, train and host users, and maintain and upgrade the beamlines. Dr. Nagarajan Venugopalan (Beamline Development Section Leader and Crystallographer) leads the engineering effort to upgrade and maintain the beamlines and supervises three staff. Dr. Sergey Stepanov (Controls Section Lead) leads the computing and networking effort and supervises three staff. Fischetti and Smith make major decisions about the operation and improvement of GM/CA and, in consultation with Venugopalan and Stepanov, set long-term goals for GM/CA. The administrative structure to operate a successful user program includes systems to receive, track, and prioritize requests for regular and rapid-access beam time, to schedule beam time, to provide an expert host for each user group, to train the users in the safe and efficient usage of the beamlines, to receive feedback from users following their beam time, to gather metrics on beam time use, to track user productivity in terms of publications and structural data deposited in the PDB, and to organize beamline maintenance and improvement. Kristin Ahrens maintains databases of users, beam time use, user publications, PDB depositions, and user funding, and she provides expert administrative support for all GM/CA activities. Dr. Michael Becker, Dr. Craig Ogata, and Smith oversee GM/CA prioritization of beam time applications and organize publicity of significant user results. Ahrens and Becker schedule beam time. Steve Corcoran organizes routine beamline maintenance, and Dale Furguson takes care of user samples. Fischetti and Smith seek advice from a GM/CA External Advisory Board and are responsible for meeting GM/CA reporting requirements.