Powder Diffraction Special Interest Group

Summary of Activities for 2004-2005

At the last Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association the Powder Diffraction Special Interest Group (Powder SIG henceforth) the membership has agreed to sponsor one workshop and three sessions at the 2005 Annual Meeting. These are, a workshop on solving and refining difficult structures from powder diffraction data, organized by Lachlan Cranswick of the National Research Council of Canada and Nattamai Bhuvanesh from Texas A&M University; a session on crystalline (non carbonaceous) hydrogen storage materials sponsored jointly with the Neutron Scattering SIG (session 08.03) and organized by Bryan Chakoumakos of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; a session on in situ and non-ambient diffraction (session 08.02) also organized by Lachlan Cranswick; and a session on inorganic materials in biological systems (session 08.01) organized by Theodora Leventouri of the Florida Atlantic University. Attempts were made to raise funds from the Department of Energy and the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Fund to support one or more of these sessions, but were ultimately unsuccessful.

In non meeting related business, Lachlan Cranswick redesigned the SIG’s web presence, currently hosted on the servers of Oregon State University’s College of Engineering at :

http://engr.oregonstate.edu/~yokochia/powdersig/index.html.

At this year’s SIG meeting, to be held Sunday from 17:30 to 18:30 any sessions to be sponsored at next year’s meeting will be discussed and agreed upon, and session organizers will be identified. Several topics have been gathered by Bryan Chakoumakos and Lachlan Cranswick who will be leading the meeting in lieu of the current chairperson who could not be present at this year’s meeting. Other issues to be discussed include the nomination of candidates for the position of chairperson for the year 2006-2007.