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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
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.