SSRL Director Jo Stöhr recently appointed two deputy directors to fill his former position: Piero Pianetta, a physicist, and Britt Hedman, a chemist. Stöhr praised their scientific expertise and managerial skills.

Hedman received her doctoral, masters and undergraduate degrees in chemistry at the University of Umeå in Sweden, where she also was a research associate and assistant professor. She came to SSRL and Stanford in 1983, and became an assistant director in 2001 and a professor in 2002.

Hedman’s research field is bioinorganic chemistry, where she studies the electronic and geometric structures of active sites in metalloenzymes and bioinorganic mimetic systems to understand their function. With her staff, she develops methods and instruments for x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), a vital tool for scientists using the x-rays generated at SSRL.

Pianetta has practiced science in Silicon Valley for more than 30 years. He received his masters and doctoral degrees in applied physics from Stanford. After graduation he worked at SSRL and then on the technical staff at Hewlett-Packard Labs before becoming a joint professor in Stanford’s Electrical Engineering Department and SSRL in 1982. He has been an assistant director since 1985.

Pianetta uses synchrotron radiation to characterize the surfaces and interfaces of semiconductor surfaces as well as develop tools for ultra-trace analysis using x-ray fluorescence. He is branching out to the areas of x-ray microanalysis and x-ray microscopy, using the new capabilities of SPEAR3.