National Seminar on Crystallography

The National Seminar on Crystallography 43A was held at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali during 28th and 30th March, 2014 by the Department of Chemical Sciences. This conference was organized as a part of the celebration of International Year of Crystallography 2014 (IYCr2014) to mark the 100th year since the  award of Nobel prize in 1914 to Max von Laue for his discovery of dif- fraction of X-rays by crystalline materials. The Local Organizing Committee (LOC) was chaired by Dr. Angshuman Roy Choudhury and included Dr. Sugumar Venkatramani and Dr Sanjay Singh and other departmental colleagues. The seminar was attended by about 100 participants, which included three plenary speakers, 19 invited speakers and many research scholars across the country. The plenary speakers (Professors Tej P. Singh, T. N. Guru Row and Professor Roland Boese) talked on their work for the past couple of decade and highlighted the essence of their contribution towards X-ray crystallography.  Professor Sekhar C. Mande from NCCS, Pune discussed the History of X-ray crystallography on the second day of the conference. The seminar had invited speakers from IIT Delhi (Professor Arunachalam Ramanan), IISc (Professor K. Suguna, Professor Parthasarathi Mukherjee, Dr. P. Thilagar), IISER Pune (Dr. R. Boomishankar and Dr. R. Vaidyanathan), IISER Thiruvananthapuram (Dr. R. Natesh), NCBS (Dr. Dipak T. Nair), Univ. of Madras (Professor D. Velmurugan), Shiv Nadar University (Dr. Parthapratim Munshi and Dr. Debdas Roy), Poornaprajna Institute of Scientific Research (Dr. Nalini G. Sundaram) . In addition to the invited lectures, there were several poster presentations by PhD students in the conference. Four awards were given to PhD students for their oral and poster presentations.