Each summer, many high school and college students perform summer research projects at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Many of the students work at the NSLS, teaming up with an NSLS scientist, as part of Laboratory-sponsored research internship programs.

National Synchrotron Light Source visiting scientist Mehmet Aslantas has won the prestigious Margaret C. Etter Student Lecturer Award for a talk on his recent work: how to reduce the effects of radiation damage to protein crystals during synchrotron x-ray studies.

Despite the rainy, humid weather, the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) Summer Sunday, held August 1, still pulled in over 450 members of the community and was one of the most enjoyable Sundays yet. For eight consecutive Sundays each summer, the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) Summer Sundays program welcomes the public to see the popular Whiz-Bang Science Show and several hands-on science exhibits. Each Sunday also showcases a different BNL facility.

A new experimental station dedicated to macromolecular crystallography has been completed and has commenced operation at beamline X29. The mini-gap in-vacuum undulator beamline was built in a collaboration between the BNL Biology Department, the Center for Synchrotron Biosciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the NSLS.

On April 24, more than 100 BNL daughters and sons learned about some of the scientific programs at the NSLS and even performed their own scientific experiments. The one-day visit was part of the national "Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day."

A hands-on EXAFS Data Collection and Analysis Short-Course was held June 22-25, 2004 at the NSLS. The course was co-organized by Bruce Ravel (Naval Research Laboratory) and Simon Bare (UOP LLC), with excellent administrative support by Lisa Tranquada (SFA, Inc.) and Melissa Abramowitz from User Administration. Thirty-two eager participants (graduate students, postdocs, and institution and industrial scientists), representing universities, national laboratories, research institutes, and industry, attended the four-day course.