James Holton

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This is me. My name is James Holton. I like to play with molecules. I'm a Beamline Scientist at 8.3.1 at the Advanced Light Source. For fun, I like to make movies. I also run benchmarks on x-ray programs. For my thesis, I've been training Elves.

Elves are a compact, portable, and intelligent "conversational user interface" to the most common X-ray crystallography programs like CCP4, mosflm, denzo, solve, and shelx. Elves exist as a single text file (shell script) which will run on any unix platform using nothing more than basic unix utilities like csh, awk and grep (plus the executables of the public-domain X-ray programs). Users communicate with the Elves in plain english, and the Elves will then locate, set up and run the appropriate x-ray programs. Elves are not a black box. They work the same way a "human crystallographer" does, by writing, running and editing scripts (.com files).

I got my BS in Biology from Caltech. Where I worked in the Mayo group.
I got my PhD in MCB from Tom Alber.