Brian H. Toby and Robert Von Dreele of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory have been selected as the recipients of the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) 2019 Trueblood Award.

According to the announcement letter from Lisa Keefe, ACA President and Director of the Industrial Macromolecular Crystallography Association Collaborative Access Team at the APS, the award is presented in recognition of their “seminal contribution to the crystallographic community, in the creation and support of widely-used open-source software (GSAS-II, GSAS, and EXPGUI), in development of new instrumentation, new diffraction techniques, and in training.”

Toby is the APS Chief Computational Scientist and Computational X-ray Science (CSX) Group Leader in the Argonne X-ray Science Division. Von Dreele is a Senior Physicist in the CSX. Together they have created the new GSAS-II crystallographic data reduction and analysis package, which is used at a number of APS beamlines and by many crystallographers around the world.

The Trueblood Award recognizes exceptional achievement in computational or chemical crystallography. Established in 2001, the award honor the memory of Professor Kenneth N. Trueblood, UCLA 1949-1998, who was a major force in the early use of computers and the development of crystallographic computer programs. Professor Trueblood applied these programs to the examination of chemical and molecular detail of many structures at the frontiers of research. His contribution to the famous work on vitamin B12 is one example. Professor Trueblood was a leader in the development of techniques for analysis of anisotropic motion and was also a superb teacher and a lucid author. GSAS-II is one of a small number of packages that implements Trueblood’s DLS description of group anisotropic motion.

Toby and Von Dreele will accept the award at the next ACA Annual Meeting in July of 2019, where they will deliver the Trueblood Award lecture and receive the awards.