Alan Soper

Alan Soper

Alan Soper in 2014, portrait from the Royal Society
Born Alan Kenneth Soper
(1951-06-15) 15 June 1951[1]
Romford, Essex
Fields
Institutions
Alma mater University of Leicester (BSc, PhD)
Thesis The Structure of Aqueous Solutions (1977)
Doctoral advisor John Enderby[2]
Notable awards
Website
www.isis.stfc.ac.uk/People/alan_soper5044.html

Alan Kenneth Soper (born 1951)[1] FRS[5] is an STFC Senior Fellow at the ISIS neutron source based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.[6][7]

Education

Soper was educated at the Campion School, Hornchurch[1] and the University of Leicester where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree followed by a PhD in 1977 for research into the structure of aqueous solutions conducted at the Institut Laue–Langevin in Greoble supervised by John Enderby.[2]

Career

Before moving to RAL in 1997, Soper was a postdoctoral researcher and assistant professor in the Physics Department at the University of Guelph, Ontario in Canada and a staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico in the United States.[1]

Research

Soper's research investigates molecular-level structures in structurally disordered systems.[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][10][18][19][20] Soper was chair of the prestigious Gordon Research Conference on Water and Aqueous Solutions in 2008 and is the co-designer of the Near and InterMediate Range Order Diffractometer (NIMROD) instrument[21][22][23][24] on the ISIS neutron source.

Soper is a world expert in the structure of water and water-based solutions at the molecular level. Using experimental techniques such as neutron and X-ray diffraction, combined with computer simulation and structure refinement, Soper investigates the organisation and behaviour of water molecules, including their interaction with other molecules and surfaces. His work has relevance given the importance of water in the biochemical processes of living organisms.[5]

He has characterised the structure of water under extreme conditions — as found miles down at the bottom of the ocean — and in heavily confined water such as occurs in nanoscopic mineral cavities. He has observed that this water is likely to be under significant tension — about -1000 atmospheres.[5]

Awards and honours

Soper was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014.[5] His nomination reads:

“ Alan Soper is distinguished as the world leading experimentalist on the structure of water and aqueous solutions, and an internationally outstanding expert on the structure of liquids in general. Besides making major and seminal contributions to the study of water and other aqueous systems, including complex systems of high chemical and biological importance, he has been influential in studies of many other liquids and glasses, and has developed novel diffraction instruments and techniques that have revolutionised the field. He has also pioneered the wider use of computer simulation as a tool for building three-dimensional models of the disordered states of matter based on measured data.[3] ”

Soper was made an ISIS Senior Fellow in 2009.[4]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 SOPER, Dr Alan Kenneth. Who's Who 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
  2. 1 2 Soper, Alan Kenneth (1977). The Structure of Aqueous Solutions (PhD thesis). University of Leicester.
  3. 1 2 "Dr Alan Soper FRS". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2014-09-16.
  4. 1 2 ISIS water legend, Materials Today 2009-08-22
  5. 1 2 3 4 "Dr Alan Soper FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-11-17. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived September 25, 2015)
  6. ↑ Alan Soper's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
  7. ↑ List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
  8. ↑ Soper, A.; Ricci, M. (2000). "Structures of High-Density and Low-Density Water". Physical Review Letters 84 (13): 2881. Bibcode:2000PhRvL..84.2881S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.84.2881. PMID 11018966.
  9. ↑ Hardacre, C.; Holbrey, J. D.; McMath, S. E. J.; Bowron, D. T.; Soper, A. K. (2003). "Structure of molten 1,3-dimethylimidazolium chloride using neutron diffraction". The Journal of Chemical Physics 118: 273. Bibcode:2003JChPh.118..273H. doi:10.1063/1.1523917.
  10. 1 2 Sposito, G; Skipper, N. T.; Sutton, R; Park, S; Soper, A. K.; Greathouse, J. A. (1999). "Surface geochemistry of the clay minerals". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 96 (7): 3358–64. Bibcode:1999PNAS...96.3358S. doi:10.1073/pnas.96.7.3358. PMC 34275. PMID 10097044.
  11. ↑ Soper, A. K. (2008). "Structural transformations in amorphous ice and supercooled water and their relevance to the phase diagram of water". Molecular Physics 106 (16–18): 2053. Bibcode:2008MolPh.106.2053S. doi:10.1080/00268970802116146.
  12. ↑ Soper, A. K. (2014). "Supercooled water: Continuous trends". Nature Materials 13 (7): 671–3. Bibcode:2014NatMa..13..671S. doi:10.1038/nmat4019. PMID 24947780.
  13. ↑ Soper, A. K. (2011). "Density minimum in supercooled confined water". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (47): E1192; author reply E1193–4. Bibcode:2011PNAS..108E1192S. doi:10.1073/pnas.1112629108. PMC 3223440. PMID 22080613.
  14. ↑ Clark, G. N.; Hura, G. L.; Teixeira, J; Soper, A. K.; Head-Gordon, T (2010). "Small-angle scattering and the structure of ambient liquid water". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (32): 14003–7. Bibcode:2010PNAS..10714003C. doi:10.1073/pnas.1006599107. PMC 2922569. PMID 20647388.
  15. ↑ Soper, A. K.; Teixeira, J; Head-Gordon, T (2010). "Is ambient water inhomogeneous on the nanometer-length scale?". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (12): E44; author reply E45. Bibcode:2010PNAS..107E..44S. doi:10.1073/pnas.0912158107. PMC 2851810. PMID 20220097.
  16. ↑ Soper, A. K. (2002). "THERMODYNAMICS: Enhanced: Water and Ice". Science 297 (5585): 1288–9. doi:10.1126/science.297.5585.1288. PMID 12193774.
  17. ↑ Dixit, S; Crain, J; Poon, W. C.; Finney, J. L.; Soper, A. K. (2002). "Molecular segregation observed in a concentrated alcohol-water solution". Nature 416 (6883): 829–32. Bibcode:2002Natur.416..829D. doi:10.1038/416829a. PMID 11976678.
  18. ↑ Pertsemlidis, A; Soper, A. K.; Sorenson, J. M.; Head-Gordon, T (1999). "Evidence for microscopic, long-range hydration forces for a hydrophobic amino acid". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 96 (2): 481–6. Bibcode:1999PNAS...96..481P. doi:10.1073/pnas.96.2.481. PMC 15162. PMID 9892659.
  19. ↑ Pertsemlidis, A; Saxena, A. M.; Soper, A. K.; Head-Gordon, T; Glaeser, R. M. (1996). "Direct evidence for modified solvent structure within the hydration shell of a hydrophobic amino acid". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 93 (20): 10769–74. Bibcode:1996PNAS...9310769P. doi:10.1073/pnas.93.20.10769. PMC 38230. PMID 8855255.
  20. ↑ Leberman, R; Soper, A. K. (1995). "Effect of high salt concentrations on water structure". Nature 378 (6555): 364–6. Bibcode:1995Natur.378..364L. doi:10.1038/378364a0. PMID 18286746.
  21. ↑ Bowron, D. T.; Soper, A. K.; Jones, K.; Ansell, S.; Birch, S.; Norris, J.; Perrott, L.; Riedel, D.; Rhodes, N. J.; Wakefield, S. R.; Botti, A.; Ricci, M. -A.; Grazzi, F.; Zoppi, M. (2010). "NIMROD: The Near and Inter Mediate Range Order Diffractometer of the ISIS second target station". Review of Scientific Instruments 81 (3): 033905. Bibcode:2010RScI...81c3905B. doi:10.1063/1.3331655. PMID 20370190.
  22. ↑ Bowron, D. T.; Soper, A. K.; Jones, K.; Ansell, S.; Birch, S.; Norris, J.; Perrott, L.; Riedel, D.; Rhodes, N. J.; Wakefield, S. R.; Botti, A.; Ricci, M. -A.; Grazzi, F.; Zoppi, M. (2010). "NIMROD: The Near and Inter Mediate Range Order Diffractometer of the ISIS second target station". Review of Scientific Instruments 81 (3): 033905. Bibcode:2010RScI...81c3905B. doi:10.1063/1.3331655. PMID 20370190.
  23. ↑ Tudisca, V.; Bruni, F.; Scoppola, E.; Angelini, R.; Ruzicka, B.; Zulian, L.; Soper, A. K.; Ricci, M. A. (2014). "Neutron diffraction study of aqueous Laponite suspensions at the NIMROD diffractometer". Physical Review E 90 (3). Bibcode:2014PhRvE..90c2301T. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.90.032301.
  24. ↑ ISIS NIMROD, Science and Technology Facilities Council
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