School of Physics & Astronomy

The Electron Microscopy and Analysis Group of the Institute of Physics held their national conference on 6-8th July (http://emag2020.iopconfs.org/home). It was originally planned to be held in Glasgow, but was moved to become the IoP's first multi-day online meeting, spread over the course of 3 afternoons plus and evening event on the Tuesday. The conference attracted over 280 registered delegates - more than double the expected numbers - and individual sessions attracted around 200 attendees, many international.

A compressed format was adopted to accommodate the pressures of home-working; and each session comprised an invited talk and a series of contributed 'flash' talks, sponsor presentations and virtual posters from academia and industry.

The theme of the conference was 'Microscopy Enabled by Direct Electron Detection', an area in which the MCMP group has a strong interest. The medipix detector has become one of a number of competing technologies that are together revolutionising electron microscopy and spectroscopy. Alongside talks that show-cased entirely new experiments made feasible by direct electron detectors, an essential element of discussion was the new algorithms required to process and analyse the resulting huge datasets that can now be acquired. The invited speakers were particularly high calibre, effectively covered all aspects of modern electron microscopy, drawing on international expertise and including our own Stephen McVitie.

As the first such online event run by the IOP on this scale, the meeting and was judged a great success by all who attended. Much of the hard work was undertaken by Donald MacLaren as Conference Chair, who was given a special vote of thanks at the end. There was also success for PG researcher Kirsty Paton (working with MCMP and PPE groups) who jointly won best student presentation: well done Kirsty!

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First published: 15 July 2020