ACA Will Meet in the Windy City

The annual meeting of the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) will take place in Chicago from Saturday, 17 July, to Thursday, 22 July. All conference activities, including the technical sessions, poster sessions, and equipment exhibition, will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Conference Center.

ACA’s 11 special interest groups—biological macromolecules, fiber diffraction, general interest, materials science, neutron scattering, powder diffraction, service crystallography, small-angle scattering, small molecule, synchrotron radiation, and young scientist—represent the wide range of topics to be covered in the more than 35 planned sessions.

The conference and exhibition will open on Saturday with a reception in the East Riverside Exhibition Center at the Hyatt at 8:00 PM. Four workshops are planned for that day. The close proximity of Argonne National Laboratory will allow for three of the workshops to be held at that facility. Meeting attendees can also sign up for an all-day tour on Saturday of ANL’s Advanced Photon Source and the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source. Advance registration is required for the tour.

This year’s Transactions Symposium will examine crystals in supramolecular chemistry in four half-day sessions on Monday and Tuesday. The individual sessions are entitled “Crystal Structure Prediction and Polymorphism,” “Crystal Growth Mechanism,” “Crystal Structure Design,” and “Applications of Crystal Design.”

The American Association for Crystal Growth, along with ACA and NASA, will sponsor sessions on Monday and Wednesday that will focus on the role of solution properties in predicting and controlling crystallization and the effect of internal order on the diffraction properties of macromolecular crystals.

Poster sessions will run Sunday through Tuesday from 5:30 to 7:30 PM. The banquet and awards ceremony will take place on Wednesday, beginning with a reception at 6:30 PM and dinner following at 7:30 PM. At the ceremony, ACA will present two new awards. The inaugural Kenneth N. True-blood Award recipient is Richard E. Marsh, senior research associate in chemistry, emeritus, at Caltech. Marsh is being recognized by ACA for his “exceptional achievement in computational and chemical crystallography.” The first Charles Supper Award will be presented to Nguyen-Huu Xuong. He is being cited for his “pioneering work in ‘filmless’ x-ray detection methods, which have revolutionized x-ray diffraction data collection for macromolecular crystallography.” Xuong is a professor of biology, physics, chemistry, and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego.

The Isidor Fankuchen Memorial Award will go this year to Alexander McPherson, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at the University of California, Irvine. According to the citation, “an outstanding teacher makes a deep impact in the lives of his protégés,” and McPherson “clearly qualifies for that distinction.”

ACA has chosen Madeleine Jacobs, executive director and CEO of the American Chemical Society, as the recipient of the ACA Public Service Award for 2004. This award is given for contributions to science policy, to science funding, or for communication of crystallography to the public.

A special workshop designed for Chicago-area high-school teachers and students is scheduled for Sunday. The session, entitled “X-rays, Crystals, Molecules, and You,” will focus on structural biology and database use in the classroom and is sponsored by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, the Protein Database, and ACA.

On display at the exhibition will be the latest in instruments and techniques for isolation, preparation, and purification of samples; crystal growth and data collection; computer software for data storage, retrieval, and analysis of graphics systems and databases; books, journals, and other essential tools for crystallographers. Managed by the American Institute of Physics, the exhibition will open Saturday evening and run through Wednesday afternoon.

On the social side, the mentor/mentee dinner will take place on Sunday evening, the young scientist mixer will be held on Monday evening, and the Rigaku/MSC fun run is planned for Tuesday.

More information about the meeting can be found at ACA’s Web site at http://www.hwi.buffalo.edu/ACA .