TIME OUT- Roselyn Mason- "There are new fields of research no one ever thought of in synchrotron radiation"
ROSELYN MASON-HEAD OF THE ESRF USERS' OFFICE ---- Roselyn Mason has an overview of all the science that goes on at the ESRF. She is the main connection between the users and the ESRF administration and is aware of the experiments being carried out, or at least she has a feeling of it. Her job as Head of the Users’ Office at the ESRF is to make users’ life easier and make sure that visits to the facility go as smoothly as possible. After 12 years in the job, this Aussie recalls her professional journey, from teaching history through personal secretary to a Nobel Prize winner to the heart of the European light source.
By Montserrat Capellas
In your job you deal with more than 5000 users a year. Isn’t that a bit stressful?
I enjoy it very much because I need interaction with people and my duties always involve them. It is challenging because it requires constant attention and organisation and there are always new facets to it, but it has to do with science, so I feel that I am contributing to something very useful.
How many users do you know?
These days not as many as before, I know a number of heads of labs, but not young post-docs or students who are coming now. It is also nice to follow the careers of some of the people in the lab.
How have the users changed over the years?
To start with, the number of users has changed. From the 68 annually of 1994 we have now reached 3500. Scientists are remarkably young these days, and there are many more women than in the past. There are also new fields of research that no one thought would ever exist in synchrotron radiation. And some of them are even connected to my early background in history and geography.
History and geography and the ESRF Users’ Office… where is the link?
Roselyn Mason at a Users' Meeting.
Believe it or not, even at work there is some connection : the culture committee reviews those proposals linked with cultural heritage. These are the ones that I read with most delight.
Your husband being a crystallographer, one would think you would be close to crystallography…
I am. Besides the link through my husband, I worked for two years as personal assistant to Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel Prize winner for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances. It is amazing how much it has evolved since the sixties, when diffraction patterns were recorded on a Kodak film and scientists had to estimate the intensities by eye, one by one…
How did it feel to work for a Nobel Prize winner?
I felt incredibly lucky, it was a wonderful experience. She was very humble and for her people always came first. At the same time she had an incredibly lucid mind and knew exactly what she wanted. She had an ability to see intuitively structures of molecules.
Do you miss your former jobs?
I really enjoyed my years teaching and today I am fond of historical biographies. But I love my job at the ESRF, organising the stay of the users and the setting up the schedule for the beamlines. There is a whole team backing up on this job, the three assistants in my group as well as the travel office, reception, safety group…
Would your work today be easier if you had a scientific background?
Every second day you learn something new at the ESRF and even if you are not a specialist you can appreciate that it is new and the impact it can have. I enjoy learning about science, but I don’t need to be a specialist. When Carl-Ivar Brändén, the former director of research, offered me this job I asked if he would not prefer a scientist. He said that the ESRF science was so vast that no one could have an overview of everything anyway and that he would prefer someone with good communication and organisation skills.
Organising 1510 experiments a year must be a source of anecdotes.
Plane or train strikes can easily leave a user stranded and it is our job to try to help them out so that they can reach the ESRF. Since “Euro land” started, everything is much easier. However, some users had problems with customs in the past when they carried protein samples. Also, non-European users working in a European country had trouble coming to France. Thanks to the Safety group and Personnel, these issues are solved now. In the past experiments were longer, so people would come with young families, and children cannot be onsite, so we needed to find last-minute babysitters. Luckily for us, today we do not have to do this anymore.
THE USERS' FORUM
The ESRF Users’ meeting started well before the instruments had beam, with the aim to meet the “customers”, keep them updated with new developments and hear their feedback. “What is difficult is to convince users to come to Users’ meetings today”, explains Roselyn Mason. “When we ask them with questionnaires what they think of the ESRF, they say they are happy with the facility, so I suppose that if they weren’t happy, we would have many more people in the meeting complaining”, she suggests. Another factor that can deter users from coming is that the ESRF User meeting competes with conferences in the specific field of the scientists, and in universities budgets to attend these conferences are often quite tight. However, last year the Users’ meeting was linked to specialised workshops and this showed an increase of attendance from 240 in 2006 to 350 last February.
The secrets of "sfumato"
HSC12- Synchrotron Radiation and Neutron for Extreme Conditions Studies