BCS Edinburgh Branch

Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre

Dr David Hartley

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.