XVII Congress and General Assembly in Seattle, 1996

The XVII Congress and General Assembly of the IUCr will be held in Seattle, Washington, August 8-17, 1996. The next issue of the IUCr Newsletter will contain preliminary information about the meeting, including details of major topics, meeting formats, organizing committee and program committee composition, satellite meetings, attractions of the Seattle site, and current sponsors.

The major topics of the meeting will be similar to those of the Beijing meeting and will reflect the growth and development of the field and the areas of most intense activity. There will be plenary lectures, microsymposiums, workshops, and poster discussion sessions. Possible innovations under consideration include poster preview sessions, and lunch time lectures. The Program Committee is being expanded to insure participation by representatives of all IUCr Commissions. Because the Commissions of the Union have international representation and expertise in almost all areas of crystallography, participation by the members in planning the program should assure full and balanced coverage of all areas.

Five satellite meetings held in conjunction with the Beijing meeting were organized by the Commissions on Electron Diffraction, Neutron Scattering, Powder Diffraction, Small Molecules, and Synchrotron Radiation. At present, the only Satellite meetings proposed for the 1996 Congress are in the fields of synchrotron radiation and powder diffraction. The Synchrotron Radiation satellite will be hosted by Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois before the meeting. The organizers of the Annual Denver Diffraction Conference have agreed to cooperate with the Commission on Powder Diffraction. They will schedule the 1996 Denver Diffraction Conference for the first week of August and identify it as a satellite meeting of the XVII IUCr Congress.

Because the Congress program is to have thorough coverage of all commission topics, the satellite programs must complement the Congress program, not duplicate or compete with it. Commission chairs, Commission members, and individual crystallographers interested in specific topics that they consider worthy of a satellite meeting should contact the Program Chairman, Bill Duax, immediately in order that their proposal can be evaluated by the Program Committee in the next few months.

The Congress has the sponsorship of the American Crystallographic Association and the IUCr. In addition, the following corporations have already made contributions or pledged support to the 1996 IUCr Congress and General Assembly: Enraf Nonius, Molecular Structure Corporation, Rigaku Instrumentation, Inc., Siemens Analytical X-ray Instruments, Inc., The Upjohn Corporation, and Merck Research Laboratories.