An update for ECA Senior Crystallographers (General Interest Group GIG-02)
August 2021
Under normal circumstances no doubt several of us would be meeting this week in Prague for the IUCr Congress, already postponed from last year and now taking place in hybrid mode. As we do not expect any significant number of our members will be attending the Congress, and as there has been essentially no activity of the group during the Covid19 pandemic, we have decided not to organise a GIG-02 General Meeting in physical, online or hybrid form (such a meeting should, according to our statutes, take place at each ECM and is optional at IUCr Congresses). Instead, we are providing this brief update with some plans for the future and suggesting a possible virtual group meeting later this year for discussion of these ideas if there is sufficient interest. The postponement of ECM33 (Versailles, France) from 2021 to 2022 means, therefore, that the current term of the elected officers will run for an extra year until August 2022.
We are currently without a group Co-chair or Webmaster. If anyone would like to take on one of these roles for the next 12 months on an interim basis until our next election, please let me or Helen Stoeckli-Evans (GIG-02 Secretary, helen.stoeckli-evans@unine.ch) know. Concerning the Webmaster there is a suggested alternative approach outlined below.
During the Prague IUCr Congress there will be a meeting of the ECM33 Programme Committee. I am representing GIG-02 on this committee and, following discussion with the other two ECA General Interest Groups (Young Crystallographers GIG-01 and Education in Crystallography GIG-03), I submitted a list of proposals for Microsymposia, which is reproduced here.
- Teaching new dogs old tricks and/or What is inside the black box? (Both jointly with GIG-03, and likely to be supported also by GIG-01); these follow on from the very successful and popular ‘Teaching new dogs old tricks’ session at ECM32 in Vienna.
- 25 years of ECA. This was originally suggested by the ECA Council, but they can’t make their own proposals and thought GIG-02 would be the ideal group to propose it on their behalf.
- Reliability in crystallography (this could also be the topic of a keynote lecture).
- What should undergraduate students learn about crystallography? (Possibly jointly with GIG-03); there could be a contribution about each major discipline – biology, chemistry, physics.
- French contributions to crystallography (also marking 200 years since the death of René-Just Haüy).
We had two other proposals originally, which are now at the bottom of the priority list and so they can effectively be dropped: Using information in Volume A of International Tables, and Public understanding of crystallography.
From the documents circulated in advance of the Programme Committee meeting, I am pleased to see that most of these suggestions have a good chance of being selected, at least in some form. It is possible the ECA 25 years celebration could be marked by an event other than a half-day microsymposium, and the fifth (lowest priority) proposal appears to have been subsumed partially into a proposal from one of the SIGs. If we are, indeed, successful in this way, there will be a substantial GIG-02 contribution to ECM33 and we will probably be asked to organise and chair some of these sessions.
The leaders of both GIG-01 and GIG-03 are very interested in developing closer relationships with GIG-02 and looking for ways of providing mutual support and encouragement as well as collaborating in proposals for conference sessions. I would like to pursue discussions along these lines. There are two particular ideas I suggest we could discuss with GIG-01, and I would value comments from our members on these. You can send comments by email and also let me know if you are interested in a short GIG-02 virtual meeting in October/November to discuss these further along with any other suggestions for developing our activities and also promoting our group to prospective members. If there is enough interest, we will organise a meeting after consulting on the availability of those who wish to take part.
The first suggestion is that we offer to the Young Crystallographers some kind of informal mentoring service. This would involve matching up GIG-01 and volunteer GIG-02 members appropriately in terms of scientific areas of interest to provide from our experience a (limited!) input of advice and encouragement complementary to their formal research supervision, subject to agreement from all concerned. I believe this would be a worthwhile continuing engagement for our members, a valued service to the next generation of crystallographers, and a credit to our group that will be recognised and welcomed by the ECA. This is worth pursuing only if there is sufficient interest from GIG-02 members.
The second is that we approach the Young Crystallographers to ask if one or more of their members would take on the role of GIG-02 Webmaster. It seems to be a task unattractive to our own members, unsurprisingly, but our website is in need of improvement to make it really useful and it could be a valuable resource. Our website could be hosted from within that of GIG-01 or separately. I haven’t really thought about this in any detail, but I’m sure there are various ways it could be done. Comments will be much appreciated!
Bill Clegg, GIG-02 Chair; bill.clegg@ncl.ac.uk
