• A year ago, I graduated as a chemist at the University of Ghent, Belgium.
  After my studies, I started there as a PhD researcher in the departement of inorganic and physical chemistry in the research group of solid state chemistry and ceramic superconductors.
• My interest in diffraction techniques was stimulated by two persons.
  
  1. During the last year of my studies chemistry, I only had to use XRD for identification of several products, but the XRD-operator introduced me to the wide possibilities of diffraction.
  2. This year, I recieved a PhD-thesis of a person who was occupied with structure determination of several metal-oxalates during his PhD study.
     After his defence I had a short talk with him on the topic, that rose my interest on structure determination.

• Earlier this year, I tried to learn more about quantitative X-ray diffraction, microstructural analysis, rietveld refinement and structure determination on my own.
  The enormous amount of literature on powder diffraction and software available for these topics, didn't make this job very easy.
  Furthermore, during my university studies, instructions on diffraction were very limited.
  This course is therefore an excellent support.
• My current reseach is inspired on the recent developments in the study of Negative Thermal Expansion (NTE-)materials.
  A lot of research in this area is done by the group of A. Sleight, J.S.O. Evans, M. Dove, Wilkinson, e.a.
  One way to investigate the fenomenon of thermal expansion is by detailed study of the crystal structure in function of temperature by HT-diffraction.

The image above shows a thermomechanical analyzer (TMA), allowing to measure the thermal expansion of bulk materials. Although the image isn't centered on the page, as you requested, I hope that I have made my task properly. (The table is centered instead.)