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CHAIRMAN'S REPORTSContents This archive contains Chairman's Reports from the following years:
For Archive of Chairman's Reports:1994 to 1998 ...click link. Chairman's Report for 2004to the 2005 Annual General Meeting of the Industrial Group.April 2005, University of Loughborough. This is my first report as chairman of the Industrial Group. For many of us, it has been a time of change. Personally, as some of you will know, Paul Barnes, myself, and others in the Industrial Materials Group in Crystallography at Birkbeck relocated last Autumn to new facilities in Chemistry at UCL. It was a sad day in the sense that it brought an end to the vision of the founder of the Departmental of Crystallography, J. D. Bernal. Bernal was a man of great vision, who, despite his background in physics, encouraged the creation of research into, what was at that time, novel areas of crystallography such as biological structure determination, liquid and amorphous diffraction, and the investigation of industrial materials such as cements. I realise that Paul Barnes and myself have been very fortunate. As I wrote for the recent Industrial Group Newsletter, many of you this year have not been so lucky. The decline of diffraction-based research still seems to continue in many industries with the loss of many skills. I have seen this at close quarters this year with 3 of the committee members facing possible (and in at least 1 case now notice of) redundancy due to closure of industrial research laboratories. It was such losses from industry that led the membership last year to question the constitution of the Industrial Group committee. As chairman, I have acted upon this and, with the agreement of the committee, have proposed the changes published in Crystallography News. We will discuss this issue later in the AGM. Despite the difficult circumstances, the Industrial Group of the BCA still has a very active committee who meet on a regular basis, typically 3 times per year, in contrast to some of the other BCA groups. We have been fortunate to have had the use of facilities at Huntsman Surface Sciences at Oldbury, near Birmingham for our committee meetings and I would like to express my personal thanks to Richard Morris for arranging these facilities. The main activity of the committee is to organise meetings and workshops of interest to the members, and this last year has been no exception. Last summer, we organised an "Introduction to Powder Diffraction" workshop, which was held at UMIST and organised by our group secretary-treasurer Judith Shackleton. I thank her for all the hard work involved. These workshops form part of our remit as an educational charitable organisation. Ideas for workshop themes from the core membership are always welcome. We do listen to your feedback: so it was feedback from the summer workshop that has directly resulted in the theme chosen for our next one this autumn on the theme of "Patents in Crystallography". This theme is so important for many of you that we have decided to include it as part of our annual autumn meeting. Consequently, the two events will be held back-to-back and it will be possible to register for either event or both. In addition, the afternoon session of the autumn meeting this year will continue our regular theme of "Crystallography in Industry". Last autumn, we had two meetings: the first held at Alderley Park and sponsored by Astra Zenecca related to our Pharmaceutical Special Interest Group. The meeting was well attended and I would like to thank Anne Kavanagh and all those who helped organise it. Personally, I found it very enjoyable as my only contribution was to simply turn up and be a member of the audience for a change. The second autumn meeting was on the slightly eclectic topic of "DIY Crystallography". We had many contrasting talks at both ends of the spectrum for both hardware and software and I would like to thank all of those who took part in this enjoyable event, which was held again at Birkbeck College. I also have to thank the School of Crystallography for sponsoring such events by the provision of facilities. Some of you may wonder why we use Birkbeck College for holding so many meetings. The answer is that the College is still one of the few academic institutions that offers cheap (as opposed to commercial) rates for academic meetings in contrast to most UK academic institutions. However, we are keen to use industrial venues too, so suggestions and, better still offers, from members located in UK industry are always welcome. The Industrial Group newsletter continues to be produced twice a year by our vice-chair, Phil Holdway, with help from Dave Taylor, and I thank them for their work. We are always on the lookout for interesting articles, so please don't hold back if you feel you have something interesting to say. Photos are also welcome. We are also very grateful to the various sponsors of the newsletter. Since the last AGM, our newsletter has been sponsored by PANalytical and Hiltonbrooks, the latter as a 25th anniversary celebration. New to the BCA Spring Meeting this year are the XRF sessions. There is appreciable overlap between XRF and XRD in terms of the manufacturers and many users of XRD also use XRF. We will discuss later in the AGM whether the Industrial Group of the BCA should consider encompassing both the XRD and XRF communities. I would also like to thank our secretary and treasurer, Judith Shackleton, for all her hard work. It is not an easy job, and I know that most of the work has to be done in her own free time at home. Please try to make her job easier by paying for Industrial Group meetings in a timely manner - following up non-payers is a time consuming exercise. Finally, in addition to thanking all of the committee for their support during the year, I would like to pay a special thank you to Dave Taylor. Not only has he been BCA Treasurer for 5 years, but he is also the Industrial Group webmaster. As such he continues to work hard behind the scenes in maintaining the web pages of the Industrial Group. They are clearly the best web pages of all of the 4 groups of the BCA and I'm sure his efforts in this area are well appreciated by all. This ends the Chairman's report for the year 2004. Jeremy Cockcroft CHAIRMAN'S REPORT for 2003to the 2004 Annual General Meeting of the Industrial Group.April 2004, UMIST, Manchester Prof. Chris Frampton reported : This is my final report as the chairman of the industrial group and looking back over the chair reports of the past three years there appears to be an underlying theme in which I say that every year there appears to be fewer and fewer true industrial crystallographers. When I took on the position as chair three years ago I thought at that time that my position with Roche Discovery was a secure one. In fact within 4 weeks of the Reading meeting it was announced that our site would be closing in 3 months. The period of my chairmanship has seen many mergers and acquisitions in the industries within which we work and this trend does not seem to show any signs of slowing up. However on a positive note I have noticed the appearance of many smaller companies offering contract analysis services and from these a new breed of industrial crystallographer is now emerging. During the past year I have changed my position. "Moving over to the dark side" as one eminent colleague put it. This has brought challenges of a different sort to my role within the Industrial Group. Our meeting program for 2003 consisted of the annual Spring meeting held at the University of York and the two day "Forum II" meeting held at Birkbeck College, in November. The Spring meeting in York consisted of sessions based on Phase Identification and Quantitative Analysis. The quantitative analysis session also reported on the results from a round robin study. Two samples were available for study an "Inorganic" and an "Organic pharmaceutical type" The round robin attracted a lot of interest and in all we had about 10 laboratories taking part. The results returned were all very impressive which demonstrates the high quality science that we do. I would like to thank Jeremy Cockcroft for taking on the lion's share of the work in organising this round robin, from preparing the samples, sending them out and collating the results. He even found time to do the experiment himself. I would also like to thank the other members of the committee for the organisation of the other sessions in the meeting. The Autumn meeting departed from the tried and tested format of a "Crystallography in Industry" meeting to a two day Forum II meeting at Birkbeck college. This meeting consisted of two joint sessions and two parallel sessions. It was a pleasure to see Colin Small presented with an Industrial Group Award and he gave an entertaining lecture entitled "Adventures in Crystallography in the Gas turbine industry". Overall I have received many positive comments on the Forum and I believe that this format of meeting is a welcome change to the usual one day meetings. For the rest of 2004, we have planned some further SIG meetings. The dates for these meeting are on the website and the program content will be filled in shortly. Please keep visiting the website for updates on these. Finally we are about to have a change in the committee this year and I would like to thank all the members of the committee for their support over the past three years. Serving the Industrial Group as chairman has been very pleasurable and rewarding experience. Chris Frampton CHAIRMAN'S REPORT for 2002to the 2003 Annual General Meeting of the Industrial Group.April 2003, University of York Prof. Chris Frampton reported : Every year there appears to be fewer and fewer true industrial crystallographers. It seems as if current working practices and management ideas in industry do not allow for the apparent luxury of an in-house diffraction laboratory. The current fashion is that a good deal of this work is currently being contracted out to University departments and specialist contract analytical companies. This year has been fairly light on meetings reflecting on the feeling that it is becoming harder and harder to justify the time away from the bench. Our meeting program consisted of the annual Spring meeting held at the University of Nottingham and the Autumn meeting held at Hulme Hall, Manchester. The Spring meeting in Nottingham consisted of three workshop sessions based around the following topics, thin films, an introduction to amorphous materials and a powder diffraction surgery. From the comments I have received from members of the group these were all deemed to be excellent sessions and very useful. I would like to thank all of the people responsible for organizing these sessions in particular, Paul Fewster, Judith Shackleton, Jeremy Cockcroft and Dave Taylor. The Autumn meeting kept again to the tried and tested format of a "Crystallography in Industry" meeting organized and hosted by Judith Shackleton at Hulme Hall in Manchester. This was a super venue for the meeting and the science was also first rate. For me the highlight of this meeting was the great pleasure at presenting Jo Jutson with an Industrial Group Award for her work on micro-diffraction and her great support of the Industrial group over past years. Her paper "From Spinel Analysis to Micro X-ray Diffraction - a Personal View of Applications and Advances" was an excellent overview of the progress in X-ray diffraction and instrumentation over the span of her career. Jo chose a Beevers model of a Spinel phase for her award. On a more depressing note we were all saddened to hear of the death of Ron Jenkins in June 2002. Ron was a larger than life character and an outstanding teacher. My first encounter with Ron Personally was fairly recent at the BCA Meeting in Leeds. I was fortunate enough to be the recipient of the IG poster prize that year which was a personally signed copy of his book. This is something I will certainly treasure for years to come. A recent survey was conducted regarding the topics for future Industrial Group meetings and I would like to thank all those who sent in replies and to Brett Cooper for collating the results. We have tried to reflect the wishes of the group when putting the program together for this years Spring meeting on the basis of this survey with Polycrystalline materials, Phase ID, and QA being the major subjects this year. Our next meeting is going to be in the Autumn and will hopefully be held over two days having a similar format to the successful IG Forum held in 1999. Program and dates will be available shortly. Finally we are about to have a change in the committee this year and I would like to thank Phil Holdway for his sterling efforts as Secretary/Treasurer. I would also like to thank departing committee members Clare Anderton and Paul Fewster for all their hard work. Working with all of the people on the committee is a great pleasure and I hope the new members enjoy the experience Chris Frampton CHAIRMAN'S REPORT for 2001to the 2002 Annual General Meeting of the Industrial Group.March 2002, University of Nottingham Prof. Chris Frampton reported : Not being present at Reading makes it very difficult for me to comment on the IG sessions held at that meeting. From reading the meeting reports and talking to the participants it was clear that the organized sessions were very rewarding. The IG group held three principal sessions, a “Basic Powder Diffraction Workshop” which was an educational session aimed at aimed at people relatively new to the field of powder diffraction, a session on “Why Industry uses Crystallography” giving an overview of the value crystallography brings to industry and finally last but by no means least “New and Future Possibilities in Powder X-ray Diffraction”, a session aimed at wetting our appetites for the diffractometer and software of the future. The next meeting that followed in 2001 was a Pharmaceutical SIG hosted by Clare Anderton at GlaxoSmithKline. This meeting was based around a loose theme of High Throughput Powder Diffraction, a very popular and topical subject and as a consequence the meeting was very well attended. On a lighter note, I now know where the expression “no such thing as a free lunch” comes from. The final meeting of the year returned to the tried and tested format of a “Crystallography in Industry” meeting organized by Judith Shackleton and hosted by Mark Farnworth of Pilkington European Technical Centre, Lancashire. This meeting had the usual broad depth of subject with talks from diverse sectors of industry. It was also a great pleasure at this meeting to present Ian Langford with the Industrial Group Award for his work on profile analysis. Given that he had used Zinc Oxide as an example in many of his papers it was fitting that Ian should choose to have a Beevers model of zinc oxide for his award. Perhaps the most challenging event of this year for me was that six-weeks after the Reading spring meeting the untimely and completely surprising announcement of the closure of Roche Discovery Welwyn, where I had been employed as a crystallographer for the previous 9 years. This came as a complete shock to both me and my colleagues at Roche and is perhaps a sign of the times that we are living in. Steve Norval comments in his 2001 chair report that “crystallographers working in industry are becoming an endangered species” for me were very prophetic. It is true that industrial crystallography positions appear to be shrinking by the year with mergers and closures taking their toll on our numbers. This is of course continuing to take its toll on the committee and consequently it is becoming harder and harder to fill vacant positions. The IG newsletter and web pages continue to grow and I would
like to thank Phil Holdway, Colin Small and David Taylor for
their efforts in this direction. On a continuing note I would
also like to thank our Industrial sponsors for the newsletter,
Bruker AXS and Phillips Analytical X-ray. Chris Frampton CHAIRMAN'S REPORT for 2000to the 2001 Annual General Meeting of the Industrial Group.10 April 2000, University of Reading Dr Steve Norval reported : 2000 saw IG return to a more conventional programme after the peculiarities of the IUCr congress and the IG Forum in 1999. The sessions at the Heriot-Watt meeting incorporated the pharmaceuticals special interest area (organised by Philip Lake) and controlled environment xrd (organised by Dave Taylor). That was followed up by a workshop on non-ambient diffraction run by Dave and Jeremy Cockcroft at Birkbeck College. At the end of the summer, Judith and Phil put together a residual stress workshop at UMIST and then Chris Frampton hosted our Autumn Meeting at Roche Discovery. It was a great pleasure to present one of our former chairmen, David Dyson, with an Industrial Group Award at that meeting. There is much that could be said in praise of the contributions made to these events, but I don't want to single-out individuals. They all deserve our warmest thanks. However, I should mention that we have had three events at Birkbeck in the course of a year. That has been a very useful pied-a-terre for us in London and we are very grateful to Jeremy for making it possible. One of those meetings was our main annual committee meeting that we combined with a discussion of European Standards for XRPD. That was very helpful to me in representing UK and BCA on the European Working Group putting the documents together. That work is continuing and it should not be too long now before the first two standard documents appear. The Group newsletter continues to prosper. Our total circulation is around 400. That can make it a bit expensive, so some of the circulation now is electronic. Colin Small has put in two years as editor and has really helped to make it less of a list of things past present and future. The web site also gets better every year. It has been particularly useful lately to have the best information on meeting programmes appearing there so quickly. I am sure that some speakers names have been on the web within an hour or two of agreeing to give a talk. We have made an excellent start to 2001 with the excellent presentations already made here. There have been a number of powder diffraction workshops with different emphases over the years. This one gave a very balanced account of basic crystallography, powder diffraction instrumentation and phase identification. We have also had some fascinating accounts of the ways in which our techniques are being used by different industries and some powder diffraction developments to look forward to over the next few years. Thanks go to all those who gave up their weekend and particularly those who put together such excellent presentations. Later this year, we are to have a one-day pharmaceuticals meeting in June at GlaxoSmithKline, Harlow. Pilkingtons at Ormskirk have agreed to host our Autumn meeting (1 November). Judith Shackleton is putting together a programme for that, so look out! We also expect to be making another Industrial Group Award at that meeting. Next year, there is the possibility of another Industrial Crystallography Forum. It has become apparent over these last three years that crystallographers working in industry are becoming an endangered species, at least in some sectors. Many of the survivors are really tightly constrained by short-sighted management who are reluctant to let them participate in BCA and the like. These meetings, where we can learn or share our science with our peers, help many people to keep going as scientists (I won't claim that it helps them keep them sane - pleasantly eccentric is a bit more like it!). This raises important questions for the future of IG. It has been getting much more difficult to find real industrial speakers and even people to come to meetings. The need to have practitioners trained and informed has not disappeared. Indeed, there seems to be a much higher turnover of people working in powder diffraction, too many of them relying on "black-box" answers because it is too time-consuming and expensive to get properly trained. I am personally convinced of the value of IG to British industry, but it will be difficult to maintain it because of the pressures on individuals, especially committee members. I would ask you all to give your committee every help and encouragement to keep it going. A consequence of the changing industrial world is that we have had a high turnover of committee members and officers over the last three years. We have had three vice-chairmen in three years. Others disappeared before we got around to asking them if they would do it! I have been asking myself what my responsibility has been for this. After all, to lose one vice-chairman might be considered unfortunate; to lose two might be considered careless; to lose three seems downright negligent. Realistically, this is the kind of situation that might be expected for the future. The new committee may have to consider a more practical way forward than assuming that committee members will be around for three years or that future chairmen will have served three years on the committee and another three as vice-chair. Finally, it just remains to say a very real thank-you to so many that have served on the committee. Colin Small is leaving us this year and Philip Lake has kindly stayed with us for an extra year as a co-opted member. We do thank them both for going more than the extra mile with us and for all the hard work they have put in over several years. To all of the committee who have served this year and over the previous two, I would again say a heart-felt thank-you. It is you guys that turn something worthy into something worthwhile and very enjoyable. Steve Norval CHAIRMAN'S REPORT for 1999to the 2000 Annual General Meeting of the Industrial Group.Dr Steve Norval reported : In the course of the Forum, we doubled-up on the Alun Bowen lecture and an Industrial Group Award that was presented to David Rendle, who also gave the lecture. It was a great pleasure to catch up with David again, and it is good to see that he has just been re-elected as a member of the ICDD board. For some, 1999 was the year of the IUCr Congress at Glasgow, which was a great success in many ways. The IG was well-represented, in quality if not number of delegates. The main Group input was a poster that displayed a range of uses of Industrial Crystallography in UK (it is now on the web site). After the Forum, the committee took some time to decide that there should be an Autumn meeting. Other crystallography meetings seemed to have left most of our community exhausted by November. But a format was found to suit a smaller number of participants and the meeting was held at Birkbeck College, hosted by Jeremy Cockcroft. The workshop covered the use of the Internet, software available on the Internet and Spreadsheets for Crystallography, with plenty of hands-on time, making the most of the local facilities. It was well received by those who came and the format is already influencing plans for at least one workshop this year. Another spin-off from the meeting was a set of spreadsheets from the web site and the hope that it will grow as a facility for a much wider community around the world. Our thanks go to Dave Taylor for starting something with real potential. Our other activities continue strongly. The web site continues to grow and the Newsletter continues to go out twice a year, now under the editorial control of Colin Small. It's good to see that Colin has stamped some of his personality on it, with a bit more human interest to reports, etc. I continue to represent BCA and UK in the group working towards a European Standard for XRPD. I took that on 3 years ago thinking it would mean attending two or three meetings over a couple of years. I don't dare to make predictions about just when it will be completed, but if anyone is interested in getting involved, it's certainly not too late. The good news is that two of the five parts of the standard are quite close to completion. Before finishing, I must once again thank the Committee all for the tremendous effort they have made on our behalf over last year. In many ways it is a sign of the times for manufacturing industry that several individuals have had to resign or take a back seat. Bruce Fox and Graham McPherson have changed jobs. Jo Jutson retired from work at the end of last year and couldn't continue as vice-chair. Kath Clay, Mary Vickers and Philip Lake have all come to the end of their three-year term as committee members. All of these people have helped far and wide in organizing specific meetings and in the many other less obvious things that get done by the committee. I would like to finish with a special work of thanks to Jo Jutson. Jo has served on the committee as a member, secretary/treasurer, and latterly as vice-chairman. She has always been available to help and given so much to the group. I am sure we all wish her well in her retirement. Finally, thank you all for supporting the group activities over the year. We have a very full programme arranged for this year and hope we will see you often. Steve Norval |
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Industrial Group of the BCA