Crystallographers Convene South of Cincinnati

The American Crystallographic Association (ACA) will hold its annual meeting next month in Coving-ton, Kentucky, which is just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. The meeting will take place Saturday, 26 July through Thursday, 31 July, at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center.

Sessions at this meeting will cover a wide range of topics, among them incommensurate structures, membrane proteins, dynamics of macromolecules, structural science in chemical crystallography, and new and high-resolution macromolecular structures. Other subjects include high-energy materials, small-angle scattering instrumentation, laboratory practices in service crystallography, hard and soft materials, genomics and crystal growth solutions and techniques, nucleation processes, and grant writing and interviewing skills.

The technical sessions are organized by ACA’s 10 special interest groups: biological macromolecules, fiber diffraction, general interest, materials science, neutron scattering, service crystallography, small-angle scattering, small molecules, synchrotron radiation, and young scientists. An 11th special interest group—powder diffraction—will assemble for the first time at this meeting. The mission of this newly created group is to disseminate information on advances in research of powder-based structure solutions. The group will present its results at future ACA meetings.

Twinning and crystals, crystal growth and macromolecules, data processing and scaling with Mosfilm and CCP4, and the Cambridge Structural Database System are the focus of four workshops that are being offered on Saturday for early arrivals.

The Transactions Symposium, a highlight at this annual meeting, will explore biological neutron diffraction over three half-day sessions, beginning on Tuesday.

Taking place over two days (Sunday and Monday), a special symposium will focus on time-resolved diffraction in chemistry and biology. Invited and contributed papers will cover recent advances in time-resolved macromolecular and chemical/materials-oriented crystallography and will spotlight other experimental and theoretical techniques that are currently being applied to dynamic processes in amorphous phases and crystals.

Two ACA awards will be bestowed during the annual award ceremony and banquet that will be held in the ballroom of the Embassy Suites Rivercenter Hotel, in Coving-ton, on Wednesday at 7:00 PM. James Ibers, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, will be presented with the 2003 Martin J. Buerger Award. “No other chemist/crystallographer active today has played a more prominent role in the development of crystallography as the most important structural method of the chemical sciences,” says the citation. He is also being acknowledged for his voluminous and excellent research record that has had “enormous impact on the progress of modern structural inorganic chemistry.”

The 2003 Bertram E. Warren Diffraction Physics Award will go to Takeshi Egami. He is being recognized by ACA for his “pioneering use of pair distribution functions from diffraction data to study disorder and defects in imperfect crystals leading to new understanding of the physics of complex materials.” Egami is Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Distinguished Professor in the departments of materials science and engineering and physics and astronomy at the University of Tennessee.

A special computing session entitled “Future Strategies for Successful Crystallographic Computing” will take place in a half-day session on Monday. A special poster session on synchrotron and neutron research facilities is scheduled to take place Monday evening.

ACA offers many opportunities for attendees to socialize, beginning with the opening reception on Saturday at 8:00 PM at the Newport Aquarium, the mentor/mentee dinner that will take place on Sunday at 7:30 PM, the YSSIG mixer scheduled for Monday at 7:30 PM, and a riverboat dinner cruise on Thursday evening at 6:00 PM.

The exhibition show, organized by the American Institute of Physics and featuring the latest products and services available for crystallographic research, will run Sunday through Tuesday at the convention center.

Details on this annual convocation of ACA are available online at http://www.hwi.buffalo.edu/aca .