Candidates for 2000 ACA Offices

Summer 1999

Vice-President
Bill Stallings

Fellow and Research Group Leader, Structural and Computational Chemistry, Discovery Medicinal Chemistry, Monsanto/Searle, 700 Chesterfield Parkway N., St. Louis, MO

Education: B.S. in Chemistry, Washington College, (69); Ph.D. in Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, (74); NIH Postdoctoral Fellow & Research Associate, Institute for Cancer Research, (75-80); Research Biophysicist, (80-88), University of Michigan.
Professional Activities: Co-editor, Acta Crystallographica, Program Chair: ACA '97, Chair: Biological Macromolecules Special Interest Group; Member and Current Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Industrial Macromolecular Crystallography Association; Member: NASA Review and Biotechnology Panels.
Research Interests: Enzyme Mechanisms, Structure-Based Drug Design, Hydrogen Bonding, Synchrotron Radiation.
Statement: Among the techniques available for structural studies, applications of diffraction and related scattering techniques continue to play major roles and make most of the outstanding contributions in structural science. This has been possible because the techniques that we use continue to move forward at an impressive rate. Bright beams at synchrotron sources have contributed to success and over the last twenty years advances in hardware, software, graphics, detectors, molecular biology and new approaches to the phase problems we face have all made us more productive scientists. The ACA is the premier forum for bringing together those of us who find this both significant and fascinating, and ACA members should expect the organization to address the needs, issues and concerns that are of primary importance to the entirety of its diverse membership.

The ACA can best serve its constituency by being a strong advocate of its members, their accomplishments and future potential. There is seldom a time when government and private support for research is adequate. The ACA can contribute to enhanced funding for research by finding new ways to advocate and publically recognize our contributions to industries that have their bases, for example, in materials science, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. The outcomes that we should expect are better funding for academic research with continued support for national synchrotron and neutron sources. Development of the future leaders of our community should be another focus of the organization which should provide ever increasing opportunities to younger scientists for responsiblity, recognition and career development. To ensure the future of our science, we should also advocate better training in crystallography at all levels - undergraduate, graduate and beyond - and an even more grass roots approach beyond the millenium should target high schools, through our membership, by preparing tools that could be organized into a course unit that would keynote the power, physics, diversity and beauty of crystallography and structural science.

From my perspective, the current organization of the ACA allows it to function smoothly. Marcia Colquhoun, Bill Duax and their staff at the Buffalo Headquarters provide continuity by ensuring that the ACA runs efficiently. ACA Council, which is renewed every year through elections, provides further guidance, responsibility and direction for advancing the organization. The standing committees and SIGs provide another level of organization. The SIGs, in particular, play a valuable and leading role organizing the scientific sessions of our annual meetings. A constant challenge to almost any scientific organization is that it provide mechanisms for the professional growth, development and recognition of both its members and its science. I would therefore challenge each of the SIGs and standing committees to also play roles in this activity by bringing public recognition to at least one or more outstanding individuals or teams who have made significant accomplishments in their areas during any given year.

As an organization, the ACA has grown enormously since the time that I joined in the early seventies when only about 300 crystallographers attended both of the ACA meetings that were held each year. Almost everyone who attended these meetings could give talks and there were no posters. The annual meetings are now typically attended by sometimes more than 1000 crystallographers. I think that we are now comfortable with this growth and have been successful in preserving the benefits of the smaller meetings by continuing to provide excellent opportunities for all members to get to know most of their colleagues, and for giving all scientists - and especially young scientists - opportunities to present and talk about their work. There are, however, areas where we could improve our meetings. Ensuring that still more leaders from our various subdisciplines were among the attendees would be an area that I would like to see targeted.

The ACA has been a significant component of my own career development and it is an honor to have been nominated for this office. If elected, I would pledge to use the best of my abilities to serve the organization.

  Vice-President
Jill Trewhella

Laboratory Fellow, Bioscience and Biotechnology Group, Chemical Science and Technology Div., Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM

Education: B.Sc. (First Class Honors), Physics and Applied Mathematics, University of New South Wales, (74), M.Sc., Physics, University of New South Wales, (77), Ph.D., Inorganic Chemistry, University of Sydney, (80).
Professional Activities: American Crystallographic Association, Chair of the Small Angle Scattering Special Interest Group (97/8), Program Committee, Arlington Meeting, 1998; Biophysical Society, Secretary (99-02), Publications Committee Chair (96-99), Executive Board (94-96), Council (93-96), Program Committee and Symposium Chair, Kansas City Meeting (98); Neutron Scattering Society of America, Executive Committee, Member at Large (93-96), Secretary of the Steering Committee (91-93); International Scientific Advisory Committee, Biophysics and Synchrotron Radiation Conference, Chicago, 1998; Program Committee, International Conference on Neutron Scattering, Toronto, 1997; NIH Molecular and Cellular Biophysics Study Section (96-00); Advisory Committee, Solid State Div. ORNL (99- ); DOE/Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee for review for the High Flux Reactor ad its user program (98); DOE/Biological and environmental Research Advisory Committee on Structural Biology (98); National Institute of Standards Technology, Cold Neutron Research Facility Program Advisory Committee (91-98, chair 93-98); Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory Proposal Review Panel (93-96).
Research Interests: Application of physical methods to the study of biological structure and dynamics as a basis for understanding biological function, particular interest in the molecular basis for biochemical signaling.
Statement: X-rays, neutrons, and electrons as probes of molecular and materials structure, have had a profound impact on science and technology in the 20th century. Crystallographic methods have been central to our advances, providing us with atomic resolution detail on everything from simple inorganic crystals, through more complex materials like high temperature superconductors, small organic molecules, to the intricate macromolecules of biology. As science and technology move toward increasingly complex questions in chemistry, materials science, and biology, continuing advances are increasingly dependent on our ability to combine crystallographic data with information from other experimental techniques. In addition, large-scale computing and sophisticated computa-tional tools have become key to reliable and accurate interpretation of the rich diversity of information in these combined data. The American Crystallographic Association has been a steward not only of crystallographic technologies but, importantly, also of their application in the context of the larger scientific goals of the many disciplines the technique serves.

The American Crystallographic Association is where many disciplines come together and discuss ways of advancing their common techniques and applying them in new and innovative ways to a wide variety of science and technology development. The diversity of disciplines represented in the ACA is an important aspect of the organization as a whole. Science is moving steadily from the reductionist, discipline focused view that has served us so well in the past, to an era where we must study complex systems at a level that demands new ways of thinking and approaching the complexity. In this environment, the ACA becomes a natural focal point for multidisciplinary science because of the central role of crystallographic methods in structure determination across the board.

I began my scientific life as a physicist solving small-molecule crystal structures,and then moved into biomolecular structural work using low-resolution diffraction and solution scattering of X-rays and neutrons. I use these experimental approaches, in combination with computational tools, in order to study the component structures in functional biomolecular complexes. High-resolution crystallography is key to being able to obtain meaningful information from these lower resolution techniques in order to understand how the component structures interact and communicate in a wide variety of functional states. In my own work, I have continually made progress by bringing together the results of different technological methodologies with a perspective that to some extent integrates the different approaches of physicists, chemists and biologists.

If elected as Vice President of the ACA I would continue to promote the ACA as an organization that serves many scientific disciplines such that cross-fertilization between them benefits us all. The ACA also must continue to be a strong advocate for federal support for the synchrotron and neutron sources that are critical to the continued health of our science and technology development. Our professional societies in general must play strong leadership roles in promoting and publicizing the scientific accomplishments of our membership, both within the scientific communities, to Congress, and the public. The ACA must be a place for facilitating the communities' input into the development of standards for evaluating data and making that data available to the scientific community in the most useful formats. Finally, the ACA must be a society that attracts the brightest of our young scientists, and helps educators to bring these young people into our fields so that it will continue to grow and be vital.
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