2024 LCLS Users' Recognition Award
During the annual SSRL/LCLS Users’ Meeting in September, Takahiro Sato received the 2024 LCLS Users’ Recognition Award.
The award, now in its third year, recognizes LCLS facility staff who have made significant contributions to the user community by supporting experiments or advancing the facility through their scientific area of research, instrumentation or capability development. The recipient is chosen by the LCLS Users’ Executive Committee based on nominations from the user community.
Takahiro, who started at SLAC in 2016 as a scientist at LCLS, is now the instrument lead of the X-ray Pump Probe (XPP), where he builds endstation and sample environments and sets up new configurations for pioneering experiments. No stranger to X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) after more than a decade at RIKEN in Japan, Takahiro knows the unique challenges users face in working in ultrafast X-ray research.
Over the years, Takahiro has focused his efforts on understanding experimental bottlenecks and complex procedures to optimize beamline operations for scientific users. At XPP and the X-ray Correlation Spectroscopy (XCS) instrument, Takahiro took feedback from the user and scientific communities and turned it into opportunities. He helped develop new multifunctional chambers for supporting more experimental parameters, for example, which were used in more than 50% of experiments this year. They included a high resolution monochromator, X-ray polarization control optics, a downstream X-ray focusing lens and an X-ray beam splitter. “His impressive breadth of scientific and technical expertise guided LCLS user science and drove new scientific directions,” says Sebastien Boutet, director of LCLS’s Experimental Operations.
With his deep knowledge of XFEL light sources, Takahiro helped users design their experiments from scratch. At XPP, he used the hutch’s large flexible spaces to arrange experimental setups that combined X-ray optics with highly precise mechanical motions, which enabled users to concentrate on doing meaningful science rather than getting mired in setup. He’s also planning new instruments to broaden the scientific impact of XPP by leveraging a thousand-fold increase in the coherent X-ray flux that the upcoming LCLS-II-HE will deliver.
Being able to accommodate the needs of users and collaborators from around the world makes Takahiro proud. That feeling is shared by others in Takahiro’s orbit who see his work ethic as integral to making things better for everyone. “Takahiro has committed to the success of each user experiment under his watch at XPP,” says Diling Zhu, deputy director of LCLS’s Science Research and Development division. “His extraordinary attention to preparation and detail saved us precious beamtime and increased our operational efficiency.”
As XFEL science continues to grow at SLAC, Takahiro says that expanding scientific parameters will continue to be essential to that growth. And as it grows, users will increasingly rely on LCLS and people like Takahiro. “He’s an outstanding beamline scientist whose intense focus on driving improvements at our facility has lowered the barrier to entry for users and driven a new level of precision for all,” says LCLS Director Mike Dunne. “I’m very pleased to see this recognition of his sustained contributions.”
Reflecting on the recognition, Takahiro gave thanks to the many users and staff at LCLS and AD who have supported him over the years. “My motivation comes from getting to work directly with our users to see the success of their experiments, which happens because of the strong support we receive from the greater lab community.”
