Delbaere Is Elected Vice President of ACA

Louis T. J. Delbaere, professor of biochemistry at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, took office on 1 January as vice president of the American Crystallographic Association for 2004. He will become president in 2005, succeeding Frances Jurnak, who became president on 1 January (see Physics Today, April 2003, page 79 ).

“All researchers who use crystallographic techniques should find themselves at home in the ACA,” says Delbaere. “We must continually strive to have joint conference sessions with other societies to show the multidisciplinary nature of our work.” Delbaere adds that it is important “to continue to reach out to our Latin American colleagues to have them attend and participate in ACA annual meetings because the ACA represents the Americas as a regional affiliate of the International Union of Crystallography.”

Delbaere received his BSc in chemistry (1965) and his PhD in chemical crystallography (1970) from the University of Manitoba. He held postdoctoral positions at Oxford University and at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, before becoming a research associate at Alberta in 1973. In 1979, he joined the faculty of the biochemistry department at Saskatchewan and headed the department for five years, beginning in 1998. In 2001, he was appointed as Canada Research Chair in Structural Biochemistry. His research interests include the study of protein crystallography, particularly the enzyme phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase.

Delbaere recently completed the first half of a sabbatical at Oxford, where he examined the structures of kinases. He is spending the second half of his sabbatical at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where he plans to work on the structures of proteins involved in tuberculosis.

In other ACA election results, Douglas Ohlendorf (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) was reelected to a three-year term as the society’s treasurer. Simon Billinge (Michigan State University) was elected to a four-year term on the continuing education committee and Cathy Drennan (MIT) began her four-year term on the communications committee. Ward Smith (Argonne National Laboratory) also took office for a four-year term on the data, standards, and computing committee.