RJ Angel friends

Collaborations and Colleagues

This is the place where I have the opportunity to embarrass all of the people with whom I have worked!
Your picture will soon appear here (especially if someone donates a jpeg)!

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	This is the boss of the Crystallography Lab (and current Associate Dean for Research)! Prof. Nancy Ross consuming a well-earned beer in the Keller of Loewenbrau in Buttenheim, Franken.
	Tiziana Boffa Ballaran (on the left) is the now the staff crystallographer at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth. We first worked together on the high-pressure phase transitions in amphiboles (see European Journal of Mineralogy 12:1195-1213) and have since determined together the high-pressure behaviour of the mineral lawsonite which plays an important role in water transport in subducting slabs (see European Journal of Mineralogy 15:241-246). If you have a subscription, electronic reprints can be obtained from the EJM website. Jennifer Kung (on the right) is now faculty at the National University in Taiwan. We have collaborated on determining the equations of state of materials by combining measurements of density by X-ray diffraction with measurements of elasticity by ultrasonic interferometry (see Physics & Chemistry of Minerals, 28:35-43).
	When I was working in Bayreuth I was fortunate to have several talented post-docs working with me on various projects in high-pressure crystallography. One was Ronald Miletich, now Professor of Crystallography at the University of Heidelberg. With David Allan (now a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh) he built up the lab in Bayreuth, developed a new design of diamond-anvil cell, and investigated the high-pressure behaviour of a number of transition-metal compounds. Now we are collaborating on studying elastic softening at high-pressure phase transitions by single-crystal diffraction.
	Just to prove that while crystallographers sometimes go on field trips, petrologists sometimes do diffraction. This is Prof. Dr. Priv Doz Alan Woodland, pictured in complete control of the high-pressure beamline at the ESRF (European synchrotron) in Grenoble. I have published many papers with Alan, mostly on systems in which cation order/disorder plays a major role in determining the phase equilibria. Our biggest discovery (so far) was that all of the Mg in wadsleyite can be completely substituted by Fe (see American Mineralogist, 83:404-408).
	Alan is now a Professor in the Mineralogical Institute in Frankfurt. Alan's work on the fayalite-magnetite (Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology, 139:734-747) raised questions about possible incorporation of Fe3+ into wadsleyite and the possibility of redox melting in the Earth's transition zone. These questions were pursued by Alan's student, Mario Koch, who completed his PhD at the Mineralogisches Institut in Heidelberg before spending a DAAD Fellowship at Virginia Tech in 2003-04. Mario is a "converted" field geologist (look at his web site if you don't believe me).
	I have a long-standing collaboration with Prof. Ulli Bismayer of the Mineralogical Institute in Hamburg, working on the high-pressure phase transitions in ferroelastic lead phosphate and related compounds. These have the interesting property that their high pressure phases have the same symmetry as the phases found at high-temperatures. But while the high-T phases are dynamic in nature the high-pressure phases exhibit static disorder. During a visit to Blacksburg we collected some X-ray diffuse scattering data from the high-pressure phase.

I refuse to explain these pictures of Prof. Cliff Shaw (University of New Brunswick) except to say that these are from a field trip to the Eifel region of Germany to collect xenoliths from which one can determine the magmatic history of the volcanoes.	The other guy is Richard, famous beer drinker and mountain guide.