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Undergraduate Computational Chemistry Conference
crashlight writes: "The MERCURY Consortium (Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate computational chemistRY) has organized the first national conference in undergraduate computational chemistry at Hamilton College. Speakers are giving talks on subjects such as molecular recognition, drug design, and optomizing Gaussian. There was also a session on using Beowulfs for research. Computational chemistry is a hot area right now since researchers are able to tackle previously unsolvable problems due to increases in high-performance computing power. The MERCURY group uses a 32 processor SGI and a large Beowulf cluster for research."
It is great to see a conference trying to get undergrads into comp chem. There are many other conferences that people should be aware of if interested in presenting their work:
ACS conferences (awards for student research)
The American Chemical Society, computers in chemistry division is extremely active.
The biophysical society conferences
Even informatics conferences such as PSB, Recomb or ISMB have comp chem in them occasionally. All of these have student travel support.
The problem with undergraduate conferences is that research can sometimes get buried. I hope the organizers work hard to prevent this.
-Sean
Oh, never mind.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Yeah, right. Want to make a few million compounds just to figure out what their absorbance spectra is? How about trying to figure out where to add an atom or two to change the colour of the compound?
Computational chemistry is a very important and powerful field. Simulation and modeling of quantumn calculations save millions of dollars
Haven't you heard of 'folding@home'?
quantum chemistry computations
QSAR (look in Google)
compound selection. For instance you want to find all compounds similar to one chemical, your database contains 1 million of them, how do you do that?
combinatorial chemistry
Drug design: how do you measure absorption of drugs? Or why are these compounds drugs?
And many other things. Hope this helps. If you want to know more, check the ACS conferences sections on comp chem.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
"Real chemistry" hasn't just been about "test tubes and stirring rods and funny smells" for a generation. Chemists (especially, but not exclusively, organic chemists) have been relying on automated analysis for years to do serious work. We can analyze complex compunds now in hours which once would have taken months or years, or have been simply impossible to analyze. Computational modeling of the formation and interaction of complex compounds is the next logical step.
Ah, hell with it. You're clearly a chemical Luddite.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Leave simulation and computers in physics where they belong.
Nonsense. Physics is done with nothing more sophisticated than a slide rule for calculations. If the problem can't be done with a slide rule, just make a few simplifying assumptions and try again. Even the great Enrico Fermi used nothing more than a slide rule.
Chemists, on the other hand have a much more difficult world. They can't simplify everything down to a trivial case because the atoms they deal with have their properties determined by their complex electonic structures, and the molecules are made up of assemblies of thousand and more atoms. To understand the behaviour of these structures you must have powerful computers.