In 2004, in conjunction with the Advanced Photon Source, the APS Users Organization established the APSUO Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award to recognize an important scientific or technical accomplishment by a young investigator (senior graduate student or within two years of his or her PhD. degree) that was accomplished at or strongly beneficial to the APS.

The award, which consists of a plaque and a monetary award of $1000, will be presented at the annual Users Meeting in alternate years. The recipient of the award will also be asked to present a lecture on his/her research in the APS plenary session.

The brilliant but short-lived chemist Rosalind Franklin played a critical but largely unacknowledged role in the discovery of the structure of DNA. While working as a research associate for John Randall at King's College in 1951, Franklin was assigned to study the unwieldy DNA molecule with x-ray crystallography--a technique only just beginning to be used for biological molecules. Her results revealed the position of the sugar-phosphate backbone and the basic helical structure of the molecule; when her x-ray photographs filtered unofficially to John Watson at Cambridge, he immediately saw their implications. Franklin went on to work on the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus, but her career came to an untimely end when she died of cancer in 1958 at age 37. More information on Franklin is at

• http://www.accessexcellence.org
• http://www.sdsc.edu

Joshua Riback was recognized for his work using small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) techniques at the APS to study biophysical interactions. His research focuses on the link between the biophysical properties of macromolecules and the principles of biological phenomena. See full article here.