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Overview school

Powder Diffraction and Rietveld Refinement School 2026

The Durham Powder Diffraction and Rietveld Refinement school will be held from 12-16th April 2026 (Sunday afternoon to Thursday lunchtime).

The closing date for applications was 23rd December 2025 via the form here.

The cost of the school will be a maximum of £500 for PhD student delegates and £800 for industry delegates or those with permanent academic positions. This covers accommodation, food and copies of the school material. Thanks to our sponsors we have been able to provide bursaries to financially support some PhD/early career delegates.

The course will include a mixture of lectures, small group tutorials and hands-on computer exercises.

Topics to be covered will include:

  • Data collection strategies for X-ray and neutron diffraction
  • Constant wavelength and time of flight diffraction
  • Modelling peak shapes
  • Indexing powder patterns
  • Rietveld, Le Bail and Pawley fitting methods
  • X-ray and neutron combined Rietveld refinement
  • Extended solids and molecular systems
  • Restrained refinements
  • Rigid body refinements

Magnetic refinements will not be explicitly covered, but can be covered in informal sessions for those interested.

Teachers on the course will include John Evans, Ivana Evans, Jeremy Cockcroft, Andy Fitch, Emma McCabe, Robert Dinnebier, Arnt Kern and a dedicated team of course tutors (Sam, Oliver, Esther, George, and Anders).

The school organisers support the IUCr’s statement on gender balance and follows the IUCr Conference Code of Conduct principles. Since the school’s inception in 2000 we have striven to bring together young scientists from around the world from a range of difference scientific disciplines. The discussions amongst attendees from different cultural and scientific backgrounds gives the school a stimulating learning environment. Where possible, we ensure that the balance of delegates accepted on the school matches that of suitably-qualified applicants, and typically have approximately 50% female delegates attending.

Accommodation will be at Collingwood College Durham, lectures will be on the Durham science site. Durham is on the fast east coast rail track. London is ~2.75 hours and Edinburgh 2 hours. There are a number of cheap flights to Newcastle Airport (e.g. flybe to Exeter/Southampton; Easy Jet to Bristol/Stanstead/Geneva/Nice, etc). More travel information can be found here. Information for those attending the schoool will be here.

For more information please keep an eye on these pages or email [email protected].

If your company would like to sponsor the school please contact us.

Thanks to our sponsors for supporting the school: IUCr, Bruker, ISIS Neutron Source, The Physical Crystallography Group of the British Crystallographic Association, the Structural Condensed Matter Physics Group of the Insitute of Physics, Diamond Light Source, Solid State Sciences