Philip Coppens IUCr President Elect

Past IUCr President André Authier (right) offers congratulations to newly elected President Philip Coppens over Alajos Kalman's live body.

Philip Coppens, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the Univ. of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA has been elected President of the International Union of Crystallography, the body that joins together 38 national crystallographic organizations, encompassing about 10,000 crystallographers worldwide. A UB faculty member since 1968, Coppens is also principal investigator for the State Univ. of New York beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source located at Brookhaven National Lab. on Long Island. In 1989, he received from the U. of Nancy the highest French national university honor for foreign scholars, Doctor Honoris Causa. He has been a visiting professor at Fordham U., Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ., Aarhus Univ. in Denmark, the Univ. of Grenoble in France, and the U. of Cal. at Santa Barbara. He has lectured extensively around the world and will be on a lecture tour of Japan in January 1994.

Coppens has pioneered studies of the use of X-ray diffraction techniques to study the nature of bonding between atoms in molecules and crystals. In 1989, Coppens' research team was the first to determine the nature of small atomic distortions in certain types of high-temperature superconducting crystals, which affect the temperature at which the materials become superconducting. Recently, he and his postdoctoral research associates, M. R. Pressprich and M. A. White, completed the first X-ray diffraction study ever done of a molecule in an electronically excited state. Such experiments, which involve laser irradiation as a "pump", and an X-ray beam as a "probe" give novel information on the way molecules behave in chemical reactions. Last year, Coppens was the principal author of the book Synchrotron Radiation Crystallography (London, Academic Press).

Coppens has served as President of the American Crystallographic Assn. and served several terms as a member of the US Natl. Comm. for Crystallography of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a corresponding member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.

The author of more than 200 technical papers and articles, Coppens has also conducted research at the U. of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the Weizmann Inst. of Science in Rehovot, Israel.