In 2004, in conjunction with the Advanced Photon Source, the APS Users' Executive Committee established the APS UEC 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 is presented annually at the APS Users Meeting, which is held every spring. Awards are not necessarily made each year.

The award consists of a $1000 prize and an award plaque. The recipient of the award is also invited to present a lecture on his/her research in the APS plenary session. A complete nomination packet includes:

• Nominator statement (500 words or less) describing why the candidate deserves the award AND one DOI number for a publication
• Candidate-written short description of work for which the award is proposed (1000 words or less)
• CV of candidate
• Two letters of support

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

Dawei Xia, a scientist at Virginia Tech, is the recipient of the 2026 Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award. Xia was chosen for his work over the past several years on battery research, most recently his paper on partially disordered manganese (Mn)-rich spinel cathodes, selected as an Editor’s Choice in Advanced Materials. With practical applications of Mn-rich spinel cathodes in Li-ion batteries limited by rapid performance degradation, Xia and his colleagues revealed a full picture of the degradation mechanism using X-ray absorption spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence microscopy. These results underscore the effectiveness of these techniques in diagnosing battery degradation and point the way toward improving diverse Mn-rich cathodes for future battery design.  Read the full article here.