It is a tremendous honor to serve as the new President of the American Crystallographic Association. I look forward to working with our outstanding community and continuing the ACA’s tradition of scientific excellence, collaboration, and collegiality.

This year is a bit different from most years for the ACA, as 2026 is an IUCr Congress year, and the IUCr meeting serves as our principal gathering. I hope many of you will join us at the 27th Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography in Calgary, Canada, August 11–18, 2026. It promises to be an exciting and scientifically rich meeting, bringing together crystallographers and structural scientists from around the world.

While attending the Congress, I encourage everyone to visit the keynote lectures featuring our ACA award winners:

• David G. Rognlie Award — Yifan Cheng, August 16
• A. L. Patterson Award — Randy J. Read, August 17
• Etter Early Career Award — Emmanuel Nji, August 18

These lectures highlight the remarkable achievements and impact of our colleagues, and I know they will be among the highlights of the meeting.

I look forward to seeing and catching up with everyone in Calgary. One of the greatest strengths of the ACA community is the opportunity to reconnect with colleagues, form new collaborations, and support the next generation of scientists.

Even as we prepare for the IUCr Congress, planning is already well underway for the next ACA Annual Meeting. Our Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are actively developing ideas for sessions, and these are already shaping what promises to be a dynamic and engaging scientific program for 2027.  As planning moves forward, please remember to get your session ideas to your SIG chairs in advance of the Planning Meeting. Workshop proposals for the 2027 meeting are due September 1st.

Please mark your calendars for the next ACA meeting in San Jose, California, August 6–10, 2027. I am excited about the energy and creativity going into the program and am confident it will produce a dynamic and interesting meeting for our community.

Even though this is an IUCr year, I would also like to encourage everyone to continue supporting the ACA by renewing your membership dues. Your continued support is essential to keeping the association strong and sustaining the programs, meetings, outreach, and opportunities that benefit our entire community.  This year, many of our SIGs have become increasingly active in creating engagement opportunities outside of the annual meeting itself. I cannot wait to see the creative ideas and activities that emerge from our SIG communities.

I would also like to remind everyone about Structural Dynamics, our journal co-published by AIP Publishing and the ACA. The journal publishes articles from a global community of researchers that advance and promote crystallography and structural science, and its scope has now expanded broadly to encompass all areas of structure science and not just dynamics. I would like to thank Mark Wilson for taking over as Editor, and I look forward to the continued growth and success of the journal under his leadership.

The journal continues to feature exciting Special Topic issues. In the coming year, topics including Liquid-Phase Ultrafast Electron and X-ray Scattering and a Tribute to George Sheldrick, Whose Work Facilitated the Advance of Structural Crystallography into a Broadly Accessible Scientific Tool.  

As ACA members, we also receive a publication discount for Structural Dynamics, another valuable benefit of membership that I encourage everyone to take advantage of.

Thank you for your continued support of the ACA. I look forward to working with all of you during the coming year and to seeing many of you in Calgary and San Jose.