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Summary of the 2008 ACA Summer Course on Small Molecule Crystallography

The 2008 ACA Summer Course on Small Molecule Crystallography was held on the Indiana University of Pennsylvania campus July 7th through July 16th, 2008.  The course extensively covered both single crystal and powder diffraction.  Fifteen experts from academia, national laboratories and industry volunteered their time and energy to provide a strong scientific education in the basic principles of crystallography.  This type of education is sorely needed by the scientific community for as the demand for crystallographic information is rapidly growing, the opportunity for an education in the basic principles of crystallography has been steadily vanishing. 

This year 19 students attended from the United States, Uruguay and Brazil.  The 10-day course included 8 days of instructions (lectures in the morning, workshops in the afternoon and computer tutorials at night), a day to tour Pittsburgh and a day allotted to final student presentations.  On the final day of the course, 15 of the 19 students submitted a questionnaire to evaluate the course.  This feedback has been instrumental in continued growth and development of the course since 2003.  The questionnaire was rated on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being excellent.  Those that submitted the questionnaire unanimously judged the course as highly successful and stated that they would recommend the course to others.  The students gave a very high rating to the category “Did you enjoy the course scientifically” (4.93) and “Did you enjoy the course socially” (4.43).  The social rating may have been influenced by the fact that some students violated the IUP alcohol policy.  Unfortunately, they had a beer party in a room assigned to an alcohol rehabilitation group.  The campus police, housing staff and the drug rehabilitation personnel failed to see the humor in the situation.  The excellent reputation of the ACA Course at IUP from 2003 - 2006 helped defuse the situation.  We will have to emphasize the alcohol policy next year.

Our lecture series was lead by our quintessential lecturers, David Duchamp and Jenny Glusker who laid down the basic foundation of the student's crystallographic knowledge.  They are outstanding lecturers who strongly contribute to the success of the course.  Newcomer, Cora Lind, proved to be a wonderful asset and gave a very insightful series of talks.  She is clearly a gifted lecturer.  Jim Kaduk and Brian Toby continued their awe inspiring lectures and tutorials on advanced topics in powder diffraction.  Peter Mueller, our SHELX expert, organized an excellent tutorial as well as presenting very interesting lectures on "difficult structures" and "twinning".  Modern instrumentation was discussed in tremendous detail by Sue Byram and Lee Daniels.    Bryan Craven presented a very informative talk on atomic displacement parameters.  Bruce Noll did an excellent job discussing "Single Crystal Data Processing" and Aina Cohen gave a wonderful introduction to synchrotron sources.  The students responded favorably to the lecture series (4.71).  In all, the faculty gave over 25 presentations covering a wide range of single crystal and powder topics.  Students were provided with a hard copy of all lecture notes as well as a CD-ROM containing all notes, presentations, tutorials and course photographs.  These materials were rated highly by the students (4.93). 

A major advantage of holding the course at IUP is the tremendous IT support we receive from the IUP College of Humanities and Social Sciences.  Their superb IT staff headed by Eric Strittmatter provided the ACA faculty with an outstanding computer facility.  They clearly take great pride in ensuring the software was running at peak efficiency.  The computer tutorials were highly rated by the students (4.87).  Besides the tutorials presented by Jim Kaduk, Brian Toby, Peter Mueller and Lee Daniels, David Duchamp gave a very nice tutorial on his CRYSTMOL software and gave each student a licensed copy and John Woolcock presented an interesting set of tutorials on the CSD and PDF databases. 

This year, four diffractometers were available to the students.  The IUP X-ray facility possessed a Rigaku Miniflex and a Bruker D8 Advance powder diffractometer,  Rigaku-Americas Inc. continued their strong support by bringing an SCXmini benchtop X-ray Crystallography System (Supported by Adam Beitelman and Lee Daniels).  The Bruker APEX II diffractometer at Duquesne University was linked to IUP by Tomislav Pintauer.  The experimental sessions were highly successful due to the indispensable services of Adam Beitelman, Lee Daniels, Bruce Noll and Peter Mueller.  These individuals worked with students individually into the wee hours of the morning helping the students collect and process data.  Bruce Noll and Peter Mueller made trips between IUP and Duquesne to mount samples and operated the APEX II instrument.  The experimental sessions ran very well and received an overall rating of (4.78) from the students.  

The organizers and students are grateful for the direct financial support donated by the ACA, USNC/Cr, ICDD, PDS, Bruker-AXS and Rigaku Americas.  Their generous donations supported the student scholarships and course infrastructure.   The USNC/Cr donation also covered travel awards to South American scholars.  The organizers would also like to thank Pat Craven and Melissa Habedank for their assistance in organizing the course picnic/pool party and Antonio Scatena and Christopher Heidt, for operating the course van service and looking after the students.  Their contributions directly influenced the success of the course.  Overall, the course evaluations revealed that the 2008 ACA Course was successful in achieving its goals.  Next year, we plan on holding the ACA Small Molecule Summer Course at IUP, June 22nd - July 1st, 2009.

Charles H. Lake and Bryan M. Craven