Mexican crystallography

Participants in the First Mexican Crystallographic Congress in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.

The First Mexican Crystallographic Congress (MexCC) in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, in Nov. 1997 was attended by two hundred and fifty people and included ten plenary lectures, one hundred twenty-five oral and poster presentations. The congress also featured four courses, a workshop, an exhibit of natural and artificial crystals, and an industrial exhibition.

Plenary lecturers included "Solution crystal growth under reduced gravity" (F. Rosenberger, U. of Alabama), "Structure of the topoisomerases" (A. Mondragon, N.W.U., Illinois), "Accuracy and precision in high temperature Rietveld refinement" (A. Kern, Karlsruhe), "A Roentgen generator in San Luis Potosi in 1896" (M. Stoopen-Rometti, Mexican Fed. of Radiology and Image), "Low angle X-ray scattering" (P. Bosch-Giral, Metropolitan U. of Mexico) and "Properties of Sol-Gel catalysts" (T. Lopez-Goerne, Metropolitan U. of Mexico), "Protein crystallography in Mexico" (M. Soriano-Garcia, Nat'l U. of Mexico (UNAM), "Electronic and nuclear structure factors" (E. Ley-Koo, UNAM) and "Phase transitions through molecular dynamics" (H. Riveros-Rotge, UNAM). Courses on "Single Crystal Crystallography", "Powder Crystallography", "Electron Crystallography" and "Protein Crystallization" and workshops on "High Resolution X-ray Diffractometry" (T. Ryan, Philips Analytical and M.A. Vidal-Borbolla, U. of San Luis Potosi) and "Rietveld Quantitative Analysis" (A. Kern, Karlsruhe, and G. Picco, Spectramex, Mexico) were offered. Students received course books. The exhibition featured new equipment and services from Bruker, Philips, Bede, Pona, Rigaku, Spectramex and IACSA. The abstracts and workshop textbooks were contributed to the libraries of main Mexican and Latinoamerican Universities. The abstracts and additional information are available at http://www.unam.mx/smcr. The congress was sponsored by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT), the Latinoamerican Centre of Physics (CLAF-Mexico), the National U. of Mexico (UNAM) and the SMCr. Pleased with the success of MexCC I. Crystallographers in Ensenada, Baja California, and Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, are bidding to host the second Congress in 1999.