Dr. John Henry Beale

John received a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College London, UK before completing a DPhil in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, UK in membrane protein structural biology under the guidance of Prof. Simon Newstead. In 2016, John moved to the UK synchrotron facility, Diamond Light Source, where he developed serial crystallography techniques on beamline I24. John was then awarded a PSI-Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship in the MX group at PSI in 2019 to continue these investigations. In 2020, John became the serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) beamline scientist on Cristallina, the third experimental station of SwissFEL's ARAMIS beamline.

Since 2018, John has tried to develop strategies to create the samples required for modern serial crystallography experiments at either synchrotrons or XFELs [Beale et al., (2019), Beale et al., (2021)]. These include methods to create large volumes of micro-crystals and fixed-target mounting and loading techniques [Martiel et al., (2021), Carrillo et alI., (2023)]. Currently, as leader of the SwissMX project, John is primarily responsible for the delivery and support of user beamtime and the development of instrumentation. This responsibility significantly directs John's research towards commissioning and developing instrumentation for user experiments [Gotthard et al., (2024)].

Since September 2020, John has been the leader of the Cristallina-MX project which delivery SFX and SFX pump-probe beamtime for SwissFEL users at the Cristallina experimental station. Cristallina has been in user operation since January 2024 and from 2025 will offer fixed-target and high-viscosity-extruder (HVE) based sample delivery. For the latest information, please visit the Cristallina-MX website.