Laurent Chapon has been appointed director of the Advanced Photon Source (APS). Chapon will lead the Photon Sciences Directorate at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory through a massive upgrade of the user facility. He will begin his new role on January 10, 2022.
Chapon will join Argonne from Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom, where he has been the director of physical sciences since 2016. Chapon led the scientific strategy in this division and oversaw five of Diamond’s eight science groups, which encompasses 22 X-ray beamlines and two electron microscopes. He led groups dedicated to technological advancements in optics, metrology and detectors technology at the facility and oversaw the Project Office, User Office, and Experiment Hall groups.
As part of Argonne’s senior management team, Chapon will lead the APS through a time of extraordinary change. The APS Upgrade project will result in a transformed facility that will generate X-ray beams up to 500 times brighter than those it currently delivers. This will require a year-long shutdown of the APS, currently scheduled to begin in April of 2023, and will keep the facility at the forefront of the world’s light sources for scientific discovery.