“From saving pharmaceuticals to
saving priceless historical artefacts via saving the planet:
Understanding nanostructure with X-rays and algorithms”
Prof. Simon J. L. Billinge is a leading scientist in the field of materials science, currently a professor at Columbia University and a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is internationally recognized for his pioneering contributions to the study of local structures of materials, particularly through the use of the atomic pair distribution function (PDF) and the application of advanced diffraction techniques to complex materials.
Prof. Billinge has published more than 350 articles in scientific journals, with over 25,000 citations, and has an h-index of 77. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America, a former Fulbright and Sloan Scholar, and has received numerous awards including the 2025 Gregori Aminoff Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the 2025 Innovation in Materials Characterization Award from the Materials Research Society.