Kenneth Shankland

Kenneth's main scientific interests lie in the area of structures and transformations in pharmaceutical materials and he is heavily involved in software development for crystallographic analysis of these and other systems. His work with Prof. Bill David of the STFC Rutherford Lab on the subject of global optimisation strategies for the structure determination of molecular materials from powder diffraction data led to the publication of several key papers in the field and ultimately to the production of the DASH software package. DASH is marketed to both academic and industrial users by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.

His underlying interest in the use of computing methodologies to further this work has seen particular utility in the development of highly parallelised versions of DASH and other closely-related codes that run on distributed computing systems, including cloud services. He is an expert user of the CAF's D8 powder diffractometers and a regular user of diffraction beamlines at central facilities.

He is a member of the IUCr Commission on Powder Diffraction and the IUCr Sub-Committee on the Union Calendar. He has written a chapter on powder diffraction for the forthcoming IUCr International Tables Volume H.

He currently has two PhD students and two post-doctoral research assistants working in the area of structure determination and quantitative phase analysis, on materials as diverse as pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs and frameworks. He has an h-index of 32, and 4 of his 128 scientific publications have been cited more than 100 times.

Kenneth is a co-director of the "Power of Powder Diffraction" Crystallography Course at Erice in June 2011.