EXPO&more International Workshop

The EXPO&more International Workshop, organized by the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council of Italy, was held in Bari, a coastal town in southern Italy, from 30 September to 3 October 2019. The Workshop venue was the Videoconference room of the Polytechnic University of Bari.

The Institute of Crystallography of Bari has a long tradition of organizing meetings dedicated to the software developed by crystallographers of the Institute, for both single-crystal and powder diffraction.

The EXPO&more International Workshop was a four-day software fayre dedicated to the most recently developed versions of the open-source computer programs EXPO, QUALX, OChemDb and RootProf. Using diffraction data from polycrystalline materials, EXPO is devoted to crystal structure solution and QUALX to qualitative analysis for identification of the crystalline phase, one or more than one, contained in a compound. OChemDb is a web portal for assisting in the crystal structure determination process by retrieving information – from a suitably designed database of crystal structures already solved – on bond distances, bond angles, torsion angles, atom types and space groups. RootProf is an interactive general-purpose tool for fast processing of measurements from in situ, operando and/or multi-technique experiments.

The Workshop included both theoretical and computer sessions. The speakers, who were authors of the software, and the invited speakers, who were users of the software, presented the theoretical framework as well as the program workflow, the latest developments and examples of application. The participants were familiarized with the computer programs during the hands-on sessions, also working on their own data.

The EXPO&more Workshop brought together 75 scientists (32 female and 43 male) coming from several countries all over the world (Nigeria, South Africa, Poland, Spain, France, Germany, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, UK, USA, Brazil, South Korea and Japan) and 4 continents, as well as from different research fields. It created full participation and great scientific interest. In particular, young scientists took advantage of the support from the direct discussions with the authors of the software, which were friendly and scientifically effective.

The Workshop enjoyed financial support from the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council (Italy), IUCr, Italian Crystallographic Association (AIC), Rigaku, PolyCrystalLine, Crystals, Assing, Excelsus Structural Solutions Company and Fondazione Puglia. The collaboration with Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste was also fruitful. The attendance of 21 young scientists was covered by sponsorship from the IUCr, AIC and Excelsus; 15 of them, financially supported by the IUCr, were celebrated during the Award Ceremony (see the photo below).

The EXPO&more Workshop was effectively conducted, spreading crystallographic knowledge and presenting methodological and computational tools able to successfully face several scientific purposes in the field of powder diffraction.