We had a fantastic and successful STOE User Meeting 2025. It truly flew by! We look forward to welcoming you again next year at the STOE User Meeting 2026. In the meantime, enjoy Laura’s personal look back at this year’s highlights.

From Coffee to Crystal Structures: A Personal Take on the STOE User Meeting 2025

I blinked twice and the STOE User Meeting was already over — but what a blast it was! From the very first welcome coffee, as more and more of you arrived, the excitement to be back together as a community was in the air. In fact, so many of you joined that we filled the room to the very last seat — exactly how we like it for a STOE User Meeting!

The first session set the tone with excellent talks on precursor chemistry and coordination polymers, CO₂ reduction inspired by bacteria, and the elucidation of beautiful crystal structures. It was my great pleasure to chair this session and follow such inspiring presentations.

After lunch, we dived into software: from quantum mechanical calculations in NoSpherA2 to teasers from my powder and single-crystal programming colleagues, who later showcased their work during the Discover STOE session.

That session is always a personal highlight for me. I wandered through buzzing labs where colleagues showed off our diffractometers with all their clever accessories, sneaked into rooms where new software features were explained, and followed the company tour, before leading some visitors myself through our workshops and offices. Showing the fine mechanics at work and the precision of our turning and milling machines never fails to spark excitement, and it’s one of the moments I enjoy most.

By the time my tour wrapped up, the grill was sizzling, the first beer barrel tapped, and the evening unfolded with delicious food, ice cream, and plenty of lovely chats.

Friday morning began with exciting updates from our partners Dectris and Excillum. I had the pleasure of following up with our first results using the MetalJet F, and we wrapped the session with a fantastic talk on photo crystallography.

The final session closed the meeting with a bang: powder diffraction in all its glory. Highlights included our new Beam Optimization 2.0 for the horizontal STADI P series, which automatically optimizes the beam path — whether for routine maintenance or after exchanging the X-ray tube — and can even be retrofitted to instruments already in the field. Plans for a future version for the vertical setup are already underway. We also explored a clever, custom-built in-operando battery environment and, last but certainly not least, experiments on disordered amalgams and in situ XRD–mass spectrometry using a custom-built setup.

And just like that, it was over again. Some stayed for extra discussions, but by early afternoon we were saying our goodbyes.