Commission on Small-Angle Scattering

Commission on Small-Angle Scattering

The Commission represent the interests of the worldwide Small-Angle Scattering community, and collaborates closely with national small-angle scattering interest groups.

The Terms of Reference define the scope of the Commission's activities, which are detailed in the Annual and Triennial reports. In particular the Commission is responsible for coordinating Small-Angle Scattering talks and Microsymposia at the IUCr Congresses, helping organise the triennial International Conference on Small-Angle Scattering, and awarding the Guinier Prize. The Commission also acts as a coordinating body for discussion on topics of interest to the community.

The Members of the Commission represent both the breadth of small angle scattering areas-of-interest and the geographical range of the IUCr associates.

Check out our list of Selected Readings in Small-Angle Scattering.

Those who are interested in knowing how these things get started should take a look at the Background Material that we have provided.



Building a Worldwide Small-Angle Scattering Community

A 2021 survey of the healthy state of international collaboration within the community appeared in Journal of Applied Crystallography and the IUCr Newsletter and is also included here.

Individual members of the worldwide SAS community are hereby asked to:

Use this communication forum to its fullest. The free exchange of information, questions, and views on matters pertaining to SAS through this medium will do much to enhance the SAS community worldwide. An archive of recent postings can be found here.
  • Become members of their national associations of crystallographers.
Please take special care to include small-angle scattering as one of your research interests. 
  • Promote the work of the Commission and its affiliated national interest groups by recruiting their colleagues as members of the community whenever and wherever they encounter them.

A tribute to John Westbrook

The CSAS would like to acknowledge the significant contributions John Westbrook made to our community. In recent times, John was formally designated as our Protein Data Bank (PDB) liaison, but he had been providing ongoing assistance and invaluable technical expertise and insights to the biomolecular small angle scattering community for some time. He made many important contributions, and to list just a few: he was a major contributor to the original report from the Report of the wwPDB Small-Angle Scattering Task Force on data requirements for biomolecular modeling and the PDB [Structure (2013), 21, 875-881]; likewise, he contributed to the 2017 publication guidelines for structural modelling of small-angle scattering data from biomolecules in solution [Acta Cryst. (2017), D73, 710–728]; he played a central role in the work done to extend the sasCIF format and its applications for biomolecular data processing and deposition [J. Appl. Cryst. (2016), 49, 302-310] that was important for the inclusion of biomolecular SAS data in the PDB-Dev for biomolecular structures derived using hybrid data (https://pdb-dev.wwpdb.org/). In addition to his many technical contributions, John was always helpful and generous with his time, seeking always to be inclusive and to listen to the community perspective so that solutions he provided were optimized. John is sorely missed by those of us who had the privilege of working with him. John’s contributions to the broader IUCr community can be found in the November 2021 issue of Acta Cryst. D.

Jill Trewhella and Jan Ilavsky on behalf of the CSAS

These pages are maintained by the Commission Last updated: 15 Jun 2023