21st June 2024 | Author: Mark Coleman
What a great way to start work at Oxford Instruments! Last month saw the first EBSD users meeting since Germany 2019 in the beautiful Forest Hotel in KrakÓw, Poland. With the unfortunate cancellation of the RMS EBSD conference earlier this year, our EBSD users conference was the place to be for all things EBSD this year. With over 80 attendees, it was also an opportunity for me to meet not just users and customers, but to introduce myself as the new EBSD Product Manager to Oxford Instruments colleagues from around the globe.
The conference was a great combination of keynote speakers, presentations and poster sessions, and of course the networking at the conference dinner! There were also several key workshops that were extremely well attended at which we presented our recently released EBSD updates for AZtecCrystal 3.2. In particular, the workshops on our new particle analysis tool and MapSweeper caused quite the stir and proved to be very popular.
The users meeting was also an opportunity for us to get direct feedback from the community, which included a great mixture of new and more experienced users from both academic and industrial backgrounds. During the meeting we ran an interactive survey to gather some of this feedback:
It was clear from the feedback that there was an appetite for even more workshops, particularly since there has been a five-year gap from the previous users meeting; and even back in 2019, there were a few comments that “a user meeting now is long overdue”. It was generally agreed that the EBSD Users meetings should be held once every two years.
Perhaps even more useful for me was the pre-conference meeting held for our Applications Scientists and development teams. This was a chance for me to meet with colleagues from Europe, USA and Asia and really ‘Geek-Out’ about EBSD. This all-day meeting included presentations from colleagues from around the world which included the challenges faced by some of our customers, particularly from the semi-conductor and battery technology industries. It was also agreed that these applications and scientist meetings should be more frequent.
So, this was my second week in work for OI and chairing all sessions for both days was definitely a case of ‘in at the deep end’! But what a great way to start and where else would I physically meet everyone in the same place and at the same time and have the opportunity to present myself and some of my work to the OI community. Looking forward to the next one.
Dr Mark Coleman,
EBSD Product Manager, Oxford Instruments
Dr. Mark Coleman holds a PhD from Swansea University, focusing on using EBSD to study grain boundary engineering mechanisms. As a Senior Lecturer he was also the Program Director for Materials Science and Engineering department and has worked heavily with industry on using SEM based techniques for materials failure analysis.
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