Plenaries at American Chemical Society meeting will focus on computers in chemistry

WASHINGTON, March 3, 2016 — Scientists, in four plenary talks, will explore a variety of subjects related to the “Computers in Chemistry” theme of the 251^st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society. The meeting will take place March 13-17 in San Diego.

The presentations, which are among more than 12,500 scheduled to take place at the meeting, will be held on Sunday, March 13, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. PDT, in Room 20A-C of the San Diego Convention Center.

Overall, the presentations will illustrate the wide variety of applications for computers in science from helping develop more potent anti-HIV agents to creating brand-new proteins with the help of the general public. The titles of the plenary talks are listed below:

• George Schatz, Ph.D.: “Using self-assembly to make functional materials: Computational perspectives”
• Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, Ph.D.: “Proton-coupled electron transfer in catalysis and energy conversion”
• David Baker, Ph.D.: “Post-evolutionary biology: Design of novel protein structures, functions and assemblies”
• William Jorgensen, Ph.D.: “30 years of free energy perturbation theory: From free energies of hydration to drug discovery”

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 158,000 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.