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 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, an award plaque, and a name plate on the plaque in the APS Atrium. 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

Qilin Guo, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was named the 2022 recipient of the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award. Guo, whose research revealed process dynamics in three major aspects of the laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing process, was nominated for the award by Lianyi Chen. Chen is an assistant professor of the Grainger Institute of Engineering at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. In his remarks, Chen lauded Guo as one of the pioneers of “using synchrotron-based in-situ X-ray imaging and diffraction to study the physical dynamics of metal additive manufacturing process.” Read the full article here