Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) announced on Feb. 13 that the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source has received a $20 million federal grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant will be used to construct a new micro-focusing X-ray facility called X-rays for Life, Environmental, Agricultural and Plant Sciences.
In a press release, Schumer highlighted the importance of the grant in contributing to the advancement in scientific discovery offered by the XLEAP program.
“This $20 million federal investment will supercharge Cornell’s cutting-edge CHESS Lab and bring us to the next frontier of understanding the elemental and microscopic details of organisms,” Schumer said. “Cornell’s new XLEAP facility will be a jump forward in deepening our understanding of the building blocks of life and will advance scientific discovery from fighting climate change to biology.”
Steven Ellis, a program director of the NSF, explained that the grant was awarded for the program’s advancement of scientific inquiries and collaboration with universities outside of Cornell.
“Mid-scale projects are ideal opportunities for increasing diversity by training the next generation of researchers,” Ellis said. The partnership between Cornell and The University of Texas at El Paso, a Hispanic-serving institution, will capitalize on this opportunity by engaging graduate students in the development and testing of new hardware, enhancing the diversity of both the synchrotron-use community and the biological sciences workforce.”
CHESS Staff Scientist Louisa Smeiska will work closely with graduate students from UTEP to develop a new X-ray beamline, which is a specialized path used to guide powerful beams of light. Members of CHESS are no strangers to beamlines. Beneath Cornell’s Robison Alumni Fields lies the Cornell Electron Storage Ring which acts as the current X-ray source for CHESS’s experiments.
However, CHESS’s new, more advanced X-ray beamline will pave the way for new research possibilities. Accordingly, Smeiska will soon pivot her focus from aerospace materials to the project’s development.
“It’s really letting us ask questions we have never been able to ask before,” Smieska said, “It’s going to be a station that is dedicated to fluorescence imaging, which is something that we don’t currently have a station dedicated to.”
Smieska elaborated on the specific research CHESS hopes to conduct with the new technology.
“[XLEAP] will allow us to make elemental maps of samples,” Smieska said. “For plants, that’s exciting because you can understand where nutrients are going inside of it, allowing the people in Plant Sciences to understand what different genes do in plants.”
Smeiska is hopeful that XLEAP will help CHESS create large-scale change and address pressing global challenges.
“The potential for societal impact is huge,” Smeiska said. “If you can develop crops that are more climate-resistant and more nutritious all at the same time, that’s really exciting. There are people working on soils and carbon cycling and trying to understand how to accelerate carbon sequestration — all of these impacts are things I’m really excited about.”
The path to getting a grant for XLEAP was no easy task for Brock and his team. XLEAP’s journey started nearly a decade ago when it was originally rejected by a review panel.
“A review panel came about five or 10 years ago, and it was very disappointing — there was one particular panel member who didn’t appreciate plant science,” Brock said. “He was sitting in for a couple of National Academy members and said ‘anybody can grow a plant, why are you guys doing this?’ … That was really discouraging.”
After being rejected, Brock and his team never lost their determination, working tirelessly to make XLEAP a reality.
“I managed to convince a bunch of my colleagues not to give up, thinking we have to keep going,” Brock said. “It’s one of these stories where you just don’t ever give up, just keep trying.”
XLEAP’s construction will begin on April 1, and the project is expected to be completed by 2028. Brock explained that the building team is well-versed in beamline construction, with every part of the project “planned out to a gnat’s eyebrow.”
In addition to users from UTEP, Cornell’s XLEAP facility will attract researchers from all over the world. Joel Brock, Director of the CHESS program, explained that a majority of scientists that utilize CHESS and will utilize XLEAP are not from Cornell.
“We get about 1000 user visits a year, and the vast majority of our users are not from Cornell — most of our users are [within] driving range,” Brock said. “But we have a fair number of users from all over the world — from Asia, Europe and then beginning to get some from South America and Brazil. And there’s three [beamlines], Canadian Light Source, the Brazilian light source and Cornell Chess, [that] formed a group called the Pan Americans Light Sources for Agriculture.”
Correction, Feb. 20, 11:00 a.m.: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Cornell Electron Storage Ring is under Schoellkopf Field. It is under the Robison Alumni Fields. The Sun regrets this error, and the article has been corrected.