Stephen P. Cramer, whose research straddles the fields of synchrotron x-ray spectroscopy and bio-inorganic chemistry, is an Advanced Light Source Professor at UC Davis and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He became involved with synchrotron radiation in 1974, during thesis work on the EXAFS of nitrogenase at Stanford's SSRP. Following an NIH post-doc with Harry Gray, he joined Exxon Research, where he used EXAFS and other methods to characterize man-made and biological catalysts. Since then, he has worked on developing new synchrotron methods for characterizing metals in biology. These include the first bioinorganic applications of soft x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) and resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS). More recently, his group has employed nuclear resonance vibrational spectroscopy (NRVS) and femtosecond pump probe spectroscopy (FPPS), as well conventional methods such as FT-IR, resonance Raman, and Mössbauer spectroscopy
