Professor Jane Brown
From the September 2001 issue of 'Crystallography News' page 23 :
The 2001 Walter Hälg Prize
Professor Jane Brown
The recipient of the 2001 ENSA/Hälg Prize will be Professor Jane Brown of the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the science of neutron scattering over the last four decades. The prize is to be presented at a special session of the International Conference on Neutron Scattering, to be held in Munich between 9-13 September
Professor Brown has made a significant impact upon our understanding of the fundamental magnetic properties of materials through her contributions to both the development and exploitation of polarised neutron diffraction and advanced spherical neutron polarimetry techniques for the precise determination of complex magnetic structures and spin density distributions. She has played a key role in developing and establishing a computational framework, namely the extremely powerful and extensively used Cambridge Crystallography Subroutine Libraries (CCSL), to facilitate structure determination from crystalline diffraction. Professor Brown is also very well known to the European neutron scattering community for the expert guidance, support and training in single crystal and magnetic diffraction that she has tirelessly provided at the Institut Laue Langevin over the last thirty years.
Professor Brown is a graduate of Cambridge University, England. She first became interested in the application of polarised neutrons in the early 1960s whilst spending two years at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US. Returning to Cambridge as a senior assistant in research and subsequently assistant director of research in the Cavendish Laboratory and fellow and lecturer in Physics at Newnham College she forged close links with Harwell, where she established a programme in neutron diffraction. In 1972 she was appointed as Senior Scientist in charge of the Diffraction Group at the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble. She received a Gulbenkian Visiting Professor Appointment to work at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, in the early 1990s and has also been a Visiting Professor at Loughborough University in England for several years. Although formally retiring from the Institut Laue Langevin in 1995, she continues to run an extremely active research programme, whilst also remaining a very popular local contact for user experiments.
Professor Bob Cywinski
Chairman of ENSA
University of Leeds, UK
The "Physics World" for December 2001 had the following news on page 53.
Professor Penelope Jane Brown CPhys MInstP, Loughborough University, wins
the Guthrie Medal and Prize for her outstanding contribution to the field
of neutron scattering, especially in the area of polarisation phenomena in
scattering processes.
Jane Brown is a pioneer in neutron scattering, both in the development of polarisation techniques in scattering processes and the application of these techniques to important problems in condensed-matter physics. The techniques she has developed have been used for a variety of applications including solving complex magnetic structures.
In addition, Brown's pivotal role in determining magnetisation densities has improved understanding of bonding and phase transitions in metallic systems, and has also encouraged several eminent groups to move into this area of research. In the late 1970s she developed techniques that gave rise to several seminal papers on the finite temperature properties of itinerant magnets, as well as inititating similar research at a number of neutron centres.
As a senior scientist at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, Brown has guided the development of techniques and instruments as diverse as multi-detectors for protein crystallography and the CRYOPAD program used for three-dimensional polarisation analysis. The Cambridge Crystallographic Subroutine Library developed by Brown over three decades is now used in many laboratories worldwide and represents a highly flexible and user-friendly approach to crystallography.
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