ChemMatCARS user Yeling Dai received an award for Best Graduate Student Poster at the Eleventh International Conference on Surface X-ray and Neutron Scattering (SXNS-11), held in Chicago in July. Her poster was titles "GIXOS Study of Langmuir Surfactant Films." Yeling is a graduate student in Oleg Shpyrko's group at the University of California, San Diego.

In the work reported in the poster, Yeling and her colleagues showed that grazing incidence X-ray off-specular (GIXOS) scattering provides rapid access to in-plane and out-of-plane nanoscale structure, surface fluctuating modes, and potentially bending stiffness. She reported on detailed analysis of GIXOS from DPPC films. The team was able to obtain quantitative, Angstrom-resolution details of electron density profile normal to the surface that are comparable to those obtained from specular x-ray reflectivity measurements.