An update for ECA Senior Crystallographers (General Interest Group GIG-02)
July 2025
A significant development this year is a completely new set of ECA SIG and GIG web pages, not all of which have yet been made available for public view. The new GIG-02 page (https://ecanews.org/gig-02/) currently contains a number of annual reports and updates, together with some historical documents to get it started. There is some contact information and a facility for joining a mailing list. The intention is to generate a reliable updated list of GIG-02 member contacts to replace the list I am currently using, so please visit the page and click the link to join the mailing list. Your contact details will be used only by our Officers and will not be visible to others. If anyone is willing to contribute to the development and maintenance of our web page (for which ECA have provided some tools), whether as a Webmaster (singly or a shared task?) or on a less formal basis, please let me know!
This update is being sent to around 65–70 recipients. I have garnered the email addresses from various sources and a further dozen or so have proved to be invalid, probably being no longer used. In some cases I have two different email addresses and, for the sake of completeness, I am sending copies to both; if you receive two copies, please let me know which address you prefer to use. Even better, and for everyone receiving this message, please join the new GIG-02 mailing list as described in the previous paragraph. I very much hope we can revitalise GIG-02 after the severe negative impact of Covid.
As noted last year, in terms of activities and meetings this group has been largely dormant since the Covid pandemic; at a GIG-02 meeting during ECM32 in Vienna in 2019 most of the current Officers were elected. A planned meeting during ECM33 in Versailles in 2022 was abandoned when only two members turned up and the allocated room was completely unsuitable for a discussion anyway, being shared with a noisy poster session. I had the impression the attendance by older crystallographers was understandably quite low except for the former ECA Presidents who came to the special ‘Gold and Silver’ anniversary celebration session and the conference dinner but not the rest of the meeting. There was no ECM in 2023, the year of the IUCr Congress in Melbourne, Australia. At ECM34 in Padova in 2024 we held a joint meeting of the ECA General Interest Groups, which was attended by half a dozen GIG-02 members, principally existing and new Officers. The main topic of discussion was a proposal to set up an ECA mentoring scheme, which is described in more detail below.
I had thought that the regulations of ECA limited the total term for GIG and SIG Officers to 6 years, but on closer inspection I see that the maximum term of office is actually 4 ECMs; this would normally amount to the same thing, but the Covid disruption to IUCr Congress and ECM schedules mean this will expire at ECM36 in 2027 (Prague). It would be an enormous pity for this group to stop because we are unable to find people willing to provide support as Officers, but we have another two years to address this; ECA rules require us to have at least two, serving as Chair and Co-Chair. While I hold the Chair position, nobody is currently designated Co-Chair and we also have nobody serving as Secretary or Webmaster. The other officers currently, without specific posts, are George Ferguson, Ton Spek, and Enrique Gutierrez-Puebla. They were joined last year by John Helliwell.
During the period since 2019 I have submitted a brief annual report as requested by ECA Council except in 2021 (the 2022 report also covered 2021). I have represented GIG-02 in the planning of programmes for ECM33, ECM34 and ECM35, and will offer to do so again for ECM36, the planning for which will begin during ECM35 in Poznan next month. As part of this planning for recent meetings, the representatives of the three General Interest Groups of ECA (GIG-01 is the Young Crystallographers and GIG-03 is Education in Crystallography) have had numerous online and email discussions to coordinate our proposals for Microsymposia and drew up combined lists of proposals with mutual support for ECM33, ECM34 and ECM35. A large proportion of these proposals were accepted, so General Interest sessions have been a significant part of these conferences. They have, to a large extent, proved very popular and have drawn relatively large audiences. A list of relevant ECM35 Microsymposia is given below.
ECM35 takes place at the end of August in Poznan, Poland, with Ukrainian crystallographers involved in the organisation, as the original intended venue was Lviv. I will be there, chairing one session and speaking at another as well as contributing to the special session honouring George Sheldrick. I hope to see a number of GIG-02 members at the meeting. One lunchtime period has been set aside on Tuesday 26 August for a joint meeting of GIG-01, GIG-02 and GIG-03, since we have a lot of interests in common, not overlapping with any SIG meetings. If you’re attending ECM35, please come along to this meeting.
General Interest Microsymposia at ECM35, proposed by GIGs 01, 02 and 03:
M45: How to… successfully apply for funding
M46: Publishing crystallography
M47: Exploiting crystallographic databases in solving, refining, and validating crystal structures
M48: Potential of online courses in crystallography
We also proposed the Keynote Lecture KL13 on “Breaking Boundaries, Creating Connections: The Cambridge Structural Database at 60” to be delivered by Suzanne Ward.
A new mentoring scheme proposed by GIG-01 and GIG-02 has been approved by the ECA Executive Committee. It was described in a lunchtime webinar in May, a recording of which you can find at https://ecanews.org/education/eca-webinars-stay-tuned/; a pilot version will be launched during ECM35. While mentors and mentees can come from all sections of the ECA (but must be Individual Members to qualify), it is expected that most mentees will be early-career crystallographers, while senior crystallographers, including GIG-02 members, are likely to serve as mentors. Please consider whether you can contribute to this worthy project.
I would be very pleased to hear from any of you in response to this update, for whatever reason: an email address correction, an offer to serve as an Officer or help with the new web page, an offer to serve as a mentor in the new ECA Mentoring Scheme, an indication that you’re coming to ECM35, an encouragement to keep this group going, a suggestion of someone you think may not be a member but could be,… Over to you: GIG-02 can’t ever be more than what its members make it.
Bill Clegg, GIG-02 Chair; bill.clegg@ncl.ac.uk
