SPRUC 2018 Young Scientist Award

In this fiscal year 2018, "SPRUC 2018 Young Scientist Award" which was being invited had eleven candidates by the closing date.
　SPRUC 2018 Young Scientist Award Review Committee had rigorous process for selecting two winners.

The SPRUC 2018 Young Science Award (YSA) is given to a young scientist who is recognized as having established a notable achievement in the development of a new experimental technique or a new method for data analysis, or having achieved remarkable results in the studied field by making use of the characteristic features of SPring-8.

Award winner	Dr. Makina Saito / Institute for Integrated Radiation and Nuclear Science, Kyoto University
Research subject	Development of gamma-ray quasi-elastic scattering method and its application studies
Citation for the award	Dr. Makina Saito has been developing a gamma-ray quasi-elastic scattering method to explore atomic- and molecular-scale dynamics in the timescale of nano- to micro-seconds. Conventional quasi-elastic scattering method using gamma-rays requires long measurement time even when brilliant synchrotron radiation X-rays are available. The long measurement time is the issue obstructing the progress in application of the method. Dr. Saito has invented the original method to extract the information on material dynamics from the complicated temporal profile originated from the interference of multi-line gamma-rays. He also constructed the measurement system and demonstrated that (1) the measurement time was saved to be shorter than one-tenth of the conventional method using a single-line gamma-rays, and that (2) the information on sub-picoscond dynamics as well as nano- to microsecond ones were simultaneously obtained. Furthermore, he has successfully observed the freezing process of atomic and molecular motions toward the glass transition under supercooling condition. In addition, he developed the data analysis system for gamma-ray quasi-elastic scattering method which is also available to non-specialists.

Award winner	Dr. Keitaro Yamashita / Graduate School of Science, the University of Tokyo
Research subject	Development of data processing system for protein microcrystallography
Citation for the award	Over the recent years, research and development of protein microcrystallography are highly competitive fields for the structural analysis from highly difficult target which can only give microcrystals such as membrane proteins. Dr. Keitaro Yamashita has focused on solving the problem of microcrystallography from the data collection to the data processing. Along with the increasing difficulty of analytical samples, the data collection strategy of microcrystalline structure analysis has shifted to a strategy of collecting data from a large number of microcrystals without loss of resolution and precision. Dr. Yamashita realized automatic centering of a large number of microcrystals by SHIKA and automatic data processing by KAMO in the development of automatic data collection system ZOO. Through these developments, structural analysis using a large number of microcrystals of proteins, including drug-target membrane proteins, can be performed routinely, and users can quickly determine structures without care of growth of crystals. Dr. Yamashita has addressed the advanced issues of protein microcrystallography using micro-focus beamline at SPring-8 and contributes to the creation of many results of SPring-8 protein crystallography.