As I’m writing this column for our summer newsletter, we are rapidly approaching our 75th annual meeting in Lombard, IL. The meeting committee and headquarters team have been working overtime to get everything in order, and to make it a fantastic celebration of our community. I would like to extend a personal pre-emptive thanks to everyone involved, from our Meeting Committee, headquarters team, session chairs, speakers and poster chairs who are all contributing to make our annual meeting one with something for everyone.
You may be curious as to why this newsletter is unlike previous editions of RefleXions. As was mentioned in our Spring newsletter, our long-time editor of RefleXions, Paul Swepston, has stepped back from this important role. Thank you, Paul, for all your work and commitment to the ACA. We are moving forward into a more digital-style newsletter, and we hope that everyone finds it a fresh new platform to find out the latest developments in our Society. And while on the theme of connections and communications, I would like to remind everyone of the many ways to connect with our community through the ACA Video Library, History Portal, ACA Blog, Community Forum, and of course our society’s journal, Structural Dynamics. Please consider exploring and contributing to these important resources for our community.
Continuing the change theme that I spoke on in my Spring column, we are continuing to see rapid changes in many sectors of the North American dynamic. These can be stressful and lead to uncertainty for many of us. I would like to reassert my earlier comments and remind everyone that as a scientific society, we are steadfastly supportive of scientific excellence, belonging, cross-discipline understanding, and are stronger collectively than individually. As we support our community through change, we forward our values as a society and look to bring positive change through scientific excellence and community.
Shortly after our Spring newsletter, ACA Headquarters moved from the Hauptman-Woodward Institute (HWI) to a new office space in the Buffalo area. Headquarters is now located at 200 John James Audubon Parkway, Suite 102, Buffalo, NY 14226. I would again like to thank HWI for our long a fruitful association. We are grateful for the association with HWI and are looking forward to supporting our membership in our new location.
Back to our upcoming meeting in Lombard, IL. The program is set, and you can find everything on Oxford Abstracts, similar to the last several meetings. I remind everyone of our meeting’s Code of Conduct and point you to the program site for valuable information about the meeting as well as the program and abstracts. Our keynote speaker is Professor Stephen Burley (Rutgers University, RCSB), and we are celebrating four (4) awards this year: The Bau Neutron Diffraction Award (Craig M. Brown), Kenneth Trueblood Award (Branton J. Campbell & Harold L. Stokes), Fankuchen Memorial Award (Christos Malliakas), and Margaret C. Etter Early Career Award (Dmitry Lyumkis). The program is excellent, with something for everyone on each day of the meeting. I would take a moment to encourage everyone to stop, say hi, and welcome our young scientists and first-time attendees (who will have a flag on their name tags). Let’s again show how welcoming a community we are and share our excitement for structural science with our future leaders. We had also heard from many of our SIGs that with the early pre-meeting SIG meetings, even earlier this year due to the need for session suggestions to the IUCr2026 International Program Committee (IPC), that they would like more SIG engagement and connection at the meeting. We had thought of a SIG booth in the exhibit hall as a meeting point; however, we are fully sold out! A big thank you to our Vendors, and I hope that everyone takes the opportunity to visit as many vendors as possible. But for our SIGs, we are working on ways for SIGs to connect with each other at our Lombard meeting.
Looking forward past our upcoming meeting in Lombard, members of the ACA, USNCCr, and CNCC are working together to host the IUCr 2026 Congress in Calgary, AB, Canada, from August 11 – 18, 2026. Our annual SIG meetings were held early this year to allow for discussion and nomination of sessions and workshops to the International Program Committee (IPC) and IUCr Commissions. The IPC is now working on finalizing the program over the summer, and the call for abstracts will open in October 2025. As we are working to host IUCr2026, the congress will represent our annual meeting in 2026, and we invite all ACA members to submit an abstract, to join us in Calgary, AB, and welcome the international community.
As always, please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected], or any member of Council, with your thoughts and suggestions (contact us). We are here to support our community.
I am very much looking forward to seeing everyone in under a month in Lombard.
Gerald F. Audette
York University, Toronto, CA
