Dr Anna Sokolova was a Project Leader for the design, construction and commissioning of Bilby, the time-of-flight small-angle neutron scattering instrument at the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering and is now an Instrument Scientist on the Bilby team.

Anna is a physicist from the Small Angle Scattering Laboratory at the Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). During her PhD and in the following years, she worked extensively in the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, Hamburg outstation c/o Deutsche Electronen Synchrotron).

She has a Masters in Physics/Biophysics from the Faculty of Physics, M V Lomonosov Moscow State University (Diploma Cum laude), and a PhD in Condensed Matter Physics from the Institute of Crystallography RAS (Moscow, Russia).

Starting in October 2009, Anna started work on the Bilby project. The instrument has been commissioned and commenced user operation in 2015.

Anna’s scientific interests have grown far from the original theme of complex biological structures. In recent years, she has worked with various users groups on projects to study a wide range of materials, from surfactants to vortex line lattices and skyrmions, often using complex sample environments.