Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

This was my first ACS meeting. It was relatively close, in Philadelphia, and so we decided to car share. Another postdoc on my floor was also going to the meeting and actually has a car. It was quite a long drive but we arrived on Saturday afternoon and checked into our hotels.

I gave my first talk, "Avogadro: An integrated approach to teach computational chemistry modeling, simulation and visualization", on Monday morning in the division of chemical education. It was an interesting track on the use of "computation, modeling and molecular visualization across the chemistry curriculum". I saw other talks from high school teachers to professors on things from the use of second life to WebMO and commercial packages such as CAChe.

On Monday evening I presented my poster, "Avogadro: A framework for quantum chemistry simulation and visualization", at the Sci-Mix event as part of the division of computers in chemistry. That went really well and I met lots of people who were very positive about Avogadro and the work I presented. I presented the poster again at the computers in chemistry poster session on Tuesday evening. I don't think I got a chance to stop either evening but really enjoyed talking to everyone about my work.

My final talk on the experimental work/computational work we have been doing, "Monolayer FETs: Metal terpyridine complexes as a model material", was at the end of quite a long session on Wednesday morning. This was in the division of inorganic chemistry, in the "Nanoscience: Characerization and applications" session. After all this I was feeling pretty exhausted!

In between talks and posters I managed to attend quite a few other sessions and visited the expo several times. I met the people at Asylum Research who make some amazing AFM hardware and software - I want one of their AFMs! I was very impressed at the power of the highly configurable software that was demonstrated to me, far more powerful than anything I currently have access to.

I got the opportunity to meet some of the people who have written various pieces of software I use, such as PyMOL and ChemAxon. NanoAndMore were there and gave me a sample of a new type of conductive probe AFM tip that will hopefully help with some of the CP-AFM work I am doing. I also got quite a bit of expo swag such as periodic tables, beaker mugs and pens galore.

I got lots of ideas from the meeting, met lots of interesting people, have quite a few things I need to follow up on once I get a reasonable amount of sleep. It is a shame some of the hotels hosting meetings were so far apart but other than that it was a great meeting. I even squeezed in a little time to see some of Philadelphia, and the bits I saw were really nice. Back at work now, with new sources of inspiration and lots of new ideas/suggestions on my mind.