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Vincent Favre-Nicolin - Winner of the AFC 2020 André Guinier Award


​The "André Guinier" prize of the AFC rewards a French-speaking personality, or one who has spent a large part of his career in France, who has made an exceptional contribution to crystallography. The awarded contribution can be of a purely scientific matter or concern the promotion of crystallography, including involvement in teaching, administrative work, the organization of events or scientific mediation. The award is discerned by the AFC every two years on the occasion of its biannual congress.

Published on 24 February 2021
"The award highlights the importance of developing algorithms and making them available in open source software to enable efficient analysis of experimental data. I have been contributing to this for the past 20 years for powder diffraction, resonant diffraction, and now for the coherent X-ray imaging data so important for the operation of fourth generation synchrotron sources, at ESRF and soon at Soleil. I am pleased to see that even long after their release (Fox), these software packages are still widely used by the community" explains Vincent Favre-Nicolin.

Vincent Favre-Nicolin is currently a lecturer at the University of Grenoble Alpes, on detachment at ESRF. Vincent Favre-Nicolin is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds an agrégation in physics. He began his career working on anomalous scattering problems, for which he is one of the world's leading specialists. Vincent Favre-Nicolin then developed, notably during a stay at the University of Geneva, algorithms for the determination of ab initio structure from powder diffraction diagrams. This work led to the development of the free software FOX, which is still widely used in the community.

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