Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre
Wednesday 9th May 2001. 6.30pm
Apex Hotel, Grassmarket, Edinburgh
The CCDC was originally established as a research group in the mid
1960s in the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge. Its remit then, and
now, is to collect the data arising from the determination of
structures of small organic molecules by the use of crystallographic
techniques. The activity has grown exponentially ever since. Today,
the CCDC is a not-for-profit company located in Cambridge University
but independent of it, that receives the data of 20,000 new structures
a year and distributes a database of nearly 250,000 structures, with
supporting software, to academics and the industry on a stable self
supporting basis. Yet the CCDC is still driven by scientific rather
than financial interests.
The speaker, who is an engineer and not a scientist, was hired to run
the company when the founding Director retired. He will share with the
meeting what he believes to be fascinating model for organising
scientific research in an academic environment but financed on pure
business lines.