Alison Edwards

2025 is the fortieth year of Alison’s career pursuing Chemical Crystallography spanning enormous technological and computational advances - initially using serial detectors, sealed tube generators and magnetic tape carried to a computer centre with forms filled out to read in to the centralised mainframe computers. Alison could initially only see a diffraction pattern by taking photographs and on one occasion had to resort to bringing the precession camera back into use to resolve a structure! The first 20 years were spent entirely in X-ray laboratories and assessing data resolution and quality via the appearance of bonding density as residual peaks was her standard practice.

In 2006 Alison moved to ANSTO to a position as a chemical crystallographer associated with the newly commissioned OPAL reactor and KOALA single-crystal neutron diffractometer.

The studies undertaken over the last 20 years range from work with the “charge-density” community aimed at definitive determinations of H-atom positions through to truly experimental determinations of the chemical compositions of materials. As an analyst, Alison has preferred to use the CRYSTALS system for modelling structures since 1990.