Category Archives: General News

Nominations for the new YCG committee

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Richard Cooper| Comments Off

Nominations are now open for selected positions on the committee for the Young Crystallographers Group. The YCG will be holding elections at the AGM on Monday 16th April at 17.15 at the Warwick Spring Meeting for new committee members. Nominations should be received prior to this AGM. The posts open for nomination are:

Secretary/Treasurer
PCG Rep
CCG Rep

If you would like to nominate anybody for one of these posts, or to find out what being on the committee is like and what responsibilities these committee positions have, then please contact the YCG Secretary Anna Warren (Anna.Warren@diamond.ac.uk) before the AGM on the 16th April 2011. Nominators should also check with the person up for nomination that they are willing to stand for election prior to the nomination.

Many thanks and best wishes from the Young Crystallographers

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Posted in General News, Recent BCA Emails

Tagged YCG

CCDC Chemical Crystallography Prize for Younger Scientists

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Hazel Sparkes| Comments Off

I am delighted to inform you that the winner of this year’s CCDC Chemical Crystallography Prize for Younger Scientists is Dr Gareth Lloyd from the University of Cambridge.

The quality of the nominees for the prize was exceptionally high. However, the committee felt that during his career to date, Gareth has made an outstanding contribution to crystallography with some high impact publications. Gareth will give a talk on his research at this year’s BCA Spring Meeting in Warwick, where he will also be presented with his prize.

Best wishes,
Hazel Sparkes.
CCG Chair

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Posted in General News, Recent BCA Emails, Spring Meeting Announcements

Honorary Membership Nominations

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Elspeth Garman| Comments Off

This is the third (and last) time that as President I have had the very enjoyable task of inviting nominations for new Honorary Members of the BCA.

Honorary Membership is the highest membership accolade of the BCA, and is awarded to a small number of colleagues who have contributed significantly both to crystallography and to the work of the BCA.

In 2009 Bill Clegg, Venki Ramakrishnan and David Taylor became our most recent Honorary Members, taking the total number to 22.

In the coming year we anticipate electing one or two new Honorary Members.

Please send your nominations, together with a short (1 page) supporting case and the endorsement of at least 3 other BCA members to me at president@crystallography.org.uk by 31st January, 2012.

For information, a list of our 22 current Honorary Members is available at http://crystallography.org.uk/honorary-members

Best wishes
Elspeth Garman
President, British Crystallographic Association

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Posted in Deadline, General News, Recent BCA Emails

Tagged BCA

Member get a Member Challenge!

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Elspeth Garman| Comments Off

At the BCA 2011 AGM held at the very successful Keele Spring meeting a major topic of discussion was our shrinking membership. For the sustainability of the BCA we urgently need to recruit new members and re-recruit lapsed members.

Membership of the BCA offers:

Reduced registration for all BCA meetings
Four copies of Crystallography News per year to keep up to date with news and happenings in the field
The opportunity to actively contribute to the development of crystallography
Networking opportunities
Eligibility for students to apply to the Arnold Beevers Bursary Fund to obtain grants for meetings.
Opportunity to interact and learn from scientists outside your own area of crystallography

We seek to involve our membership in promoting the benefits of being in the BCA and so we are running a competition where the member who manages to recruit the most new or lapsed members wins free registration for the European Crystallography Meeting in Warwick in 2013. New members can now specify on their membership form who recruited them so that the recommending member can be entered into the competition. The winner will be announced at the 2012 AGM.

We ask each BCA member to approach their colleagues and contacts in any area of crystallography to consider BCA membership. If each member recruits just one new member, we could double our membership…

A further initiative is to offer an electronic version of Crystallography News to members as a pdf file instead of a paper copy. This will assist in keeping our costs down and is also better for our planet. If any member wishes to take up this offer please email the BCA Secretary Georgina Rosair: secretary@crystallography.org.uk

With best regards

Elspeth Garman
President

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Posted in General News, Recent BCA Emails

Summer School in Protein Crystallography

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Richard Cooper| Comments Off

The 18th Summer School in Protein Crystallography will be held at The University of St Andrews. The course aims to cover the theoretical and practical aspects of protein crystallography from expression and purification, through crystal growth to data collection on in-house and synchrotron sources, phasing methods (MAD, SAD, IR, MR using SHELX, PHASER, SOLVE etc.), automated model building and phase extension (e.g. ARP/wARP, BUCCANEER, SHELXE, RESOLVE), refinement (REFMAC, SHELX) and validation.Read more at the Summer School web page.

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Posted in General News

CellCheckCSD

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Richard Cooper| Comments Off

CellCheckCSD is a command line tool which aims to save end-users from wasting valuable diffractometer time due to collection of full datasets for crystal structures which are already published. It enables users to check their unit cell against the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), the world’s repository of small molecule crystal structures, before collecting a full diffraction dataset.

CellCheckCSD is a free service and has been developed for automated use through CrysAlisPro (Agilent Technologies), enabling users to check their unit cell from within their data collection software before starting a full experiment. It can be downloaded free of charge from the CCDC website at:

http://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/free_services/cellcheckcsd/

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Posted in General News

Spring Meeting 2012: change of venue

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Elspeth Garman| Comments Off

Dear Member

I wanted to let you know that the venue for the 2012 Spring meeting will not be Loughborough University, as unfortunately they are now unable to accommodate us due to having been selected as the Olympic athletes training site.

At such short notice, we are very fortunate that Northern Networking have been able to book us in to Warwick University for the same dates with similar arrangements as for SM2010. I am happy to say that although Warwick is a more expensive venue, Loughborough have said in writing that they will be covering the difference in cost. Therefore there should be no financial implications for the BCA.

SM 2012 will be an excellent opportunity for us to have a ‘dry run’ of the venue before ECM28 in 2013.

With best wishes

Elspeth

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Posted in General News, Meeting News, Recent BCA Emails, Spring Meeting Announcements

BSG prize

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Richard Cooper| Comments Off

Ivo Tews

The Biological Structures Group awarded Ivo Tews with the BSG prize at the BCA Spring Meeting 2011.

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Posted in General News

YC Prizes

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Richard Cooper| Comments Off

Oliver Zeldin

The Young Crystallographers Group awarded three prizes at the BCA Spring Meeting. The prize for best talk during the YC session was awarded to Oliver Zeldin (Oxford); the Cruickshank Prize for outstanding contributions crystallography and to the Spring Meeting was awarded to Claire Murray (Reading) and the YC Poster prize went to Lynne Thomas (Bath).