John R Helliwell, DSc (Physics, University of York), DPhil (Molecular Biophysics, Oxford University) is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at The University of Manchester. At the Synchrotron Radiation Source at the UK’s Daresbury Laboratory he held various appointments between 1979 to 2008, including as Director of Synchrotron Radiation Science. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Society of Biology, the American Crystallographic Association, an Honorary Member of the British Crystallographic Association and of the British Biophysical Society, a Corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences & Arts of Barcelona, Spain and an Honorary Member of the National Institute of Chemistry, Slovenia. His awards include the European Crystallographic Association Eighth Max Perutz Prize 2015, the American Crystallographic Association Patterson Award 2014, and the ‘Professor K Banerjee Endowment Lecture Silver Medal’ of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science 2001. He has served as President of the European Crystallographic Association (2007 to 2010), Chairman of the International Union of Crystallography’s (IUCr) Commission on Journals (1996-2005), Chairman of the IUCr Diffraction Data Deposition Working Group (2011 to 2017) and its Committee on Data (2017 onwards) and its Representative to CODATA (2012 onwards).