News

January 2023: Advancing Drug Discovery: A Webinar Series of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Join us on January 10th, 2023 12:00PM – 1:00PM ET for a webinar by Ken Duncan (Deputy Director of the Gates Foundation).

“Pandemic Preparedness: Accelerating the Discovery of New Therapeutics”

The COVID-19 pandemic showed how poorly prepared we were to deal with a newly-emerging respiratory virus. Antiviral drugs with the appropriate spectrum of activity can protect against a new pandemic threat until a vaccine can be developed and deployed. Drugs should be suitable for post-exposure prophylaxis or treatment of mild disease, possess oral activity with a good safety profile, have low cost of goods, and be easy to deliver and suitable for combination. The global research community must act collectively to generate a toolkit of antiviral agents covering a number of viral families. Scientists from many sectors – industry, academia, non-profits – will be involved, working in a multidisciplinary effort. This presentation provides a perspective on pandemic preparedness, the approaches that are being taken to tackle this problem, and the need to ensure equitable access to any drugs that are developed.

Ken Duncan is Deputy Director of Discovery & Translational Sciences within the Global Health Program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He leads the foundation’s efforts in drug discovery across therapeutic areas currently including TB, malaria, antivirals and contraception. He recently coordinated the drug discovery response to COVID-19 then developed and is implementing a strategy for pandemic preparedness to identify safe, effective agents that can be deployed in low-resource settings. Before joining the foundation in 2007, he spent 16 years in the pharmaceutical industry, most recently as Director, Diseases of the Developing World at GSK. Dr. Duncan obtained a BSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD from the University of Glasgow. Dr. Duncan conducted Postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School.

Register here: https://t.co/htHuKS3cej

November 2022: 2022 International Year of Minerology

On November 18^th, 2022, at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome there will be an international meeting entitled “Quasicrystals: State of the Art and Outlooks”.

The program can be found here: hxxps://www.lincei.it/it/manifestazioni/quasicrystals-state-art-and-outlooks-conference

The event has been organized In the frame of the 2022 International Year of Mineralogy.

Quasicrystals, materials which were discovered in nature about 15 years ago, are classified according to the order and rotational symmetry of their atomic arrangements. Glasses and amorphous solids have disordered arrangements with no exact rotational symmetry. Crystals have atomic structures with long range periodic order, that can be described by a single atom or atomic cluster that repeats at regular intervals. According to the well-known theorems of crystallography derived nearly two centuries ago, the rotational symmetries of crystals are highly restricted: two-, three-, four- and six-
fold symmetry axes are allowed, but five-, seven- and all higher-fold symmetry axes are forbidden. Quasicrystals, short for quasiperiodic crystals, have a more subtle kind of long-range order. In a quasiperiodic structure, the atomic positions along each symmetry axis are described by a sum of two or more periodic functions whose wavelengths have an irrational ratio (inexpressible as a ratio of integers). This difference exempts quasicrystals from the crystallographic restrictions: they can exhibit all the rotational symmetries forbidden to crystals, including five-fold symmetry.

The meeting will provide an excellent opportunity to present and learn the latest results in the fields of quasicrystals, complex metallic alloys and related topics. The research is highly interdisciplinary, so that the topics include mathematics, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, materials science and geoscience.

For people who want to follow the lectures in streaming, this is the link: hxxps://www.lincei.it/it/live-video

October 2022: Free Webinar on Polymorphism

ICDD hosts monthly webinar series, covering topics relating to the Powder Diffraction File^TM and JADE. Learn the potential of each – as well as the superpower they become when coupled together! In less than one hour, you will walk away with tips and tools to build your confidence and improve your productivity. You’ll be guided by ICDD’s and Materials Data’s experts and developers.

Spaces are limited so make sure you are on our mailing list to receive ICDD Newsletters and be up to date about future webinars. See our upcoming webinar topics below.

October 26th Webinar: “All You Wanted to Know About Polymorphism, but Were Afraid to Ask”

November 22nd webinar: “A Pictorial Approach to Comprehend Symmetry in Molecules and Crystals”

October 2022: Open Science Forum – Every third Wednesday of the month

The Open Science Forum features monthly talks from scientists from NIH-funded Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Centers who elect to provide updates on target priorities, advertise available resources and reagents, disclose chemical matter (such as hits, leads, and chemical tool compounds) and associated antiviral data, share findings regarding in vivo efficacy models, discuss downstream development and translation models, and share ideas.

Talks will be public, recorded, and shared online along with links to relevant resources and reagents for the benefit of other AViDD Centers and the global antiviral drug discovery community.

An unrecorded discussion with the speakers follows each pair of talks for those that wish to discuss the science behind the work more deeply.

https://asapdiscovery.org/forum/

Next forums: Wednesday November 16th, December 21st, January 18th

October 2022: Workshops announcements

IUCr HIGH PRESSURE WORKSHOP: December 6-10, 2022, Argonne National Lab

Registration for the 2022 IUCr High Pressure Workshop “Advanced High-Pressure Crystallography”  is now OPEN. Register here!

The deadline for registration and abstract submission is on November 10^th, 2022. Please use the abstract template found on the workshop’s website.

7^th MicroED WORKSHOP: December 11-14, 2022, UCLA

   https://cryoem.ucla.edu/course-2022

March 2022: Exploring Structural Database Use in Crystallography: Workshop Series

The U.S. National Committee for Crystallography (USNC/Cr) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is providing an online workshop series for students and researchers on the use, development, and maintenance of crystallographic and structural databases. Encompassing macromolecular, small molecule, and powder diffraction information, the series will include 11 modules each meeting for one or two days.

---

The 2026 IUCr Congress in Calgary Canada will be jointly hosted by the U.S. National Committee for Crystallography, the Canadian National Committee for Crystallography, and the American Crystallographic Association.  It will held at new BMO Convention Center at Stampede Park, home to one of the world’s largest rodeo festivals, which draws over a million visitors each year.”

January 2022: Welcome new voting members!

We’re excited to announce four new voting members in 2022: Bryan Chakoumakos (Oak Ridge National Lab, Neutron Sciences), Cathy Drennan (MIT, Biology & Chemistry), Allyson Fry-Petit (Cal State Fullerton, Chemistry & Biochemistry), and Jennifer Wierman (Lumen Bioscience). They bring remarkable new talent and experience to the USNC/Cr.

December 2021: Advanced Photon Source helps Pfizer create COVID-19 antiviral treatment

Scientists from pharmaceutical company Pfizer used ultrabright X-rays of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) to design a new therapeutic effective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Pfizer issues a press release.

November 2021: African Crystallographic Association (AfCA) is formed

A special session of the online Pan-African Conference on Crystallography (ePCCr) took place on Wednesday, November 17, 2021, for the official constitution of the African Crystallographic Association (AfCA) as the newest regional association of the International Union of Crystallography. The resolution forming the new AfCA regional associate was passed unanimously, to great fanfare from the session participants. The YouTube recording of the session is available.

August 2021: USNC/Cr delegation attends XXV IUCr Congress and General Assembly

The USNC/Cr delegation virtually attended the first hybrid congress of the International Union of Crystallography held in Prague, the Czech Republic, 14–22 August 2021.

July 2021: New Ways to Teach the Next Generation

Transactions from the 70th Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association: Structural Science—New Ways to Teach the Next Generation has been published in Structural Dynamics 8, 040401 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1063/4.0000125 by Joseph Tanski, Christine Zardecki, Andrey Yakovenko and Cassandra Eagle.

July 2021: Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association

The USNC/Cr committee members are looking forward to the July 30-August 5, 2021 meeting titled: Structural Science Awakens: 71st Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association. The meeting will be held virtually with workshops, plenary sessions, lectures, Scientific Interest Group sessions and poster sessions. Find out more at Annual Meeting Home (acameeting.com).

May 2021: Dr. Kristin Bennett summits Everest

You can find out more about Dr. Bennett’s research at http://www.kbscience.com.

April 2021: 2026 International Union of Crystallography Congress bid

The USNC/Cr has been actively collaborating with the American Crystallographic Association and Canadian National Committee to place a bid to host Twenty-Seventh Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography in 2026.