Chemformation

The Weekly Newsletter of the MIT Chemistry Department

Volume 14, Number 12

Friday, March 27, 1998

Next issue: Friday, April 3rd. Chemformation is published by the Office of the Department Chairman. The deadline for the next issue is Tuesday, March 31st. Please convey items of interest (or mailing list changes) to Linda Earle, Room 18-390, Department of Chemistry, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, 617/253-1803; 617/258-7500 (fax) or e-mail to lkn@mit.edu Back issues of Chemformation can be accessed via the Chemistry Department Website.

Visit the Chemistry Department Website at http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/www/

Seminar Calendar

Monday, March 30, 1998 12:00 p.m. in Room 68-181 Macromolecular Structure/Function Seminar Series	Dr. Peter Thurmfort Department of Biology "Oxygen Regulation in Legumes: Cells Modeled as Platonic Solids"
Tuesday, March 31, 1998 4:00 p.m. in Room 2-105 Refreshments @ 3:30 p.m. in 6-233 Seminar in Physical Chemistry	Professor Malcolm H. Levitt Arrhenius Laboratory, Stockholm "Using Correlated Nuclear Spin States to Estimate Molecular Geometry: Applications to Peptides, Carbohydrates, Retinals, and the Membrane Protein Rhodopsin"
Thursday, April 2, 1998 4:00 p.m. in Room 6-120 Refreshments @ 3:45 lobby of 6-120 Seminar in Biological Chemistry	Professor Peter Cresswell Yale University "Molecular Mechanisms of MHC Class I Restricted Antigen Processing"
Tuesday, April 7, 1998 4:00 p.m. in Room 2-105 Refreshments @ 3:30 p.m. in 6-233 Seminar in Physical Chemistry	Professor William P. Reinhardt University of Washington "Why is it So Hard to Simulate Entropies and Free Energy Changes in Molecular Fluids and Solutions? Is There Anything to be Done?"
Wednesday, April 8, 1998 4:00 p.m. in Room 6-120 Refreshments @ 3:30 in 6-321 Seminar in Inorganic Chemistry	Jennifer Pell Department of Chemistry M.I.T. "Deposition of Thin Films of Oxygen-Ion Conducting Bi2MexV1-xO5.5-ð (Me = Cu, Nb; x = 0.1, 0.3)"

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Chemistry

Chemistry 5.561

"Chemistry in Industry" Lecture Series

April 28	Dr. Anthony W. Czarnik Senior Director of Chemistry IRORI Quantum Microchemistry "How One Chemist Can Make 10,000 Discrete Compounds, 5 mg Each, in Under One Year"
April 30	Dr. Ralph B. Nielsen Director, Organic Materials Symyx Technologies "Adapting Combinatorial Research Strategies to Problems in Materials Science"
May 5	Dr. Andrew D. Johnson Principal Research Chemist Air Products and Chemicals "Specialty Gas R&D for Semiconductor Manufacturing: Examples of Application Development"
May 7	Dr. Sarah E. Kelly Assistant Director of Process Research & Development Pfizer Central Research "Process Research at Pfizer: No Buckets, No Shovels, No Kidding"
May 12	Dr. Michael Lewis Executive Vice President of Research and Discovery Eisai Research Institute "Chemistry on the Path to Drug Discovery: Synthesis as the Key for the Exploration of Structure"

Message from Our Chemistry Librarian

The CrossFire System is a chemical information system which combines the CrossFire search engine with databases of over 5 million chemical reactions, 7 million compounds and millions of property data fields. The companion database Crossfire Abstracts provides access to titles and abstracts to organic chemical literature from 1980 to the present.

Users are able to search the database by chemical structure and/or sub-structure, by reactant or by product. Search features also include reaction sub-structure searching, atom-atom mapping, and bond fate. Searchable fields include physical data and literature references. Hyperlinks allow for navigation between the molecule, the reaction, and the literature reference domains.

CrossFire is based on client-server RISC technology, and the client has a graphical user interface running on a PC or Mac. Queries are processed by connecting the client to the server via a local network which in turn is connected to the Internet. The server is located at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You can download the Commander client software from the server's distribution web page http://www.library.wisc.edu:4001 to a computer within MIT IP domains.

The above Web page gives instructions for installing and configuring the client with settings required for the server at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Please contact me to get the MIT user id and password you need to access the server. Beilstein Crossfire will shortly be available at the MIT Science Library. Training session(s) for this product are being planned as well. If you have any questions or need help with installing the client software, please contact Erja Kajosalo, Chemistry Librarian at MIT Engineering and Science Libraries email: kajosalo@mit.edu and Phone: 253-9795

Mark Your Calendars for the Merck/MIT Spring Symposium
Wednesday, April 1, 1998

7:30 - 8:30: Continental Breakfast

8:30 - 9:00: Sara Dempster

Optimization of Electrostatic Affinity in HIV Protease Inhibitor Design

9:00 - 9:30: Cheuk-san (Ed) Wang

Initial Experiments In Direct Method For Protein Crystallography

9:30 - 10:00: Dr. Dan Kleitman

Predicting Intron and Exon Regions in mRNA Sequences

10:00 - 10:30: Break - Coffee

10:30 - 11:00: Dr. Tod Smeal

Analysis of Age Related Changes in Transcriptional Silencing and Its Role in Replicative Senescence

11:00 - 11:30: Dr. David Sabatini

Rapamycin sensitive translational control pathways

11:30 - 12:00: Dr. Peter Sorger

Protecting Our Genetic Dowry

12:00 - 1:30: Lunch

1:30 - 2:00: Joydeep Goswami

Genetic Control of Death in Mammalian Cell Culture

2:00 - 2:30: Chuan He

Synthetic Model Studies of Dinuclear Metallohydrolases in Biology

2:30 - 3:00: Dr. Ilaria Rebay

Ras Signal Transduction: A view from the Yan gene of Drosophila

3:00 - 3:30: Break, Walk to Whitehead Auditorium

Merck presentations at Whitehead: Chair, Dr. Ed Scolnick

3:30 - 5:00: Dr. Nadia Rupniak

Preclinical development of substance P antagonists as novel antidepressants

Dr. Mark Kramer

A New Frontier in Neuroscience: Demonstration that the selective NK-1 antagonist, MK-0869, is an effective and well-tolerated antidepressant

5:00 - 5:30: Reception outside auditorium

5:30 - 7:00: Buffet dinner, Whitehead cafeteria

Glass Blowing Services

Bob DiGiacomo will be coming in on Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick up any glass blowing work that you may have available. Please bring any work to room 6-031 or call Ed Udas or John Annese at 3-4505. Bob will do the work on a first-come, first-served basis.

Help Get Organized!

Call Ed Udas at 253-4505 or stop by room 6-026 if students, faculty, or staff need help in organizing their MIT space.

Postdoctoral Fellowships

• The Center for Nanotechonology at the University of Washington is seeking applications for the position of a full-time core staff scientist on the Ph.D. level to lead the establishment and operation of the Nanotechnology user facility. The facility will be equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation for the analysis of nanoscale structures on surfaces and in bulk materials. The responsibilities include maintainance of the equipment, instructing facility users, and teaching short courses. Requirements: Doctoral or post-doctoral work should include extensive experience in two or more of the following areas: scanning probe microscopy (AFM, STM), optics including near-field microscopy and/or optical tweezers, electron microscopy, and/or in the field of molecular assembly processes. Equivalent education/experience may substitute for stated requirements.For more information please contact: Viola Vogel, Ph.D. Director, Center for Nanotechnology Box 357962 University of Washington Seattle, Washington 98195 (206) 616-9760 e-mail: muir@bioeng.washington.edu
• A postdoctoral position is available for a joined theoretical chemistry and molecular astrophysics project of the Leiden Institute of Chemistry and Leiden Observatory at Leiden University, The Netherlands in the group of Marc van Hemert and Ewine van Dishoeck. The position is financed for one year with the possibility of renewal for a second year, and can start anytime up to October 1998. The project involves the application of parallel computers in the quantumchemical and quantumdynamical description of photodissociation and rearrangement reactions of small molecules of astrophysical interest. A suitable candidate should i) be an expert programmer, ii) have ample experience with the techniques of parallel computing, like MPI and HPF, iii) have a good understanding of numerical mathematical physics methods, and iv) have a basic knowledge of quantumdynamics and quantumchemistry. The LIC has its own 15 node IBM SP computer and the group has ample access to the national supercomputer facilities. Applicants should send a curriculum vitae, publication list and a brief statement of research interests, and arrange for at least two letters of recommendation to be sent before May 1 1998 to Dr. M.C. van Hemert, Leiden Institute of Chemistry, P.O. Box 9504, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands (FAX: +31-71-5274488). Additional information can be obtained by e-mail through marc@rulgle.leidenuniv.nl or ewine@strw.leidenuniv.nl (http://strw.leidenuniv.nl).
• University of Washington, Seattle: Postdoc in the lab of Professor Karen Goldberg for mechanistic studies of fundamental organometallic reactions at late transition metal centers relevant to homogeneious catalysis (oxidative addition, reductive elimination, olefin insertion, etc.) Her website is http://www.chem.washington.edu/faculty/fac-goldberg.html Contact her at: email goldberg@chem.washington.edu or call her at 206-616-2973.

Positions

• Eisai Research Institute, has entry level BS/MS synthetic organic positions in their drug discovery group. ERI is a research-based chemistry driven pharmaceutical company that specializes in the multi-step synthesis of complex organic molecules, their goal being to create breakthrough pharmaceuticals by undertaking high-risk projects. Please contact Melissa Belliard for more information at 978-794-1117 x 297.

Faculty Positions

• Kansas State University, Salina: Seeks a Ph.D. in chemistry or applied chemistry for fall of 1998. Must have miniumum of MS in chemistry or applied chemistry plus appropriate experience in the chemical industry or a closely realted field, plus appropriate experience at the undergraduate level and will be a full time tenure track position. Send materials to: Richard A. Zajac, Dept. of Arts, Sciences and Busienss, Kansas State University, Salina, 2409 Scanlan Ave. Salina, KS, 67401, 785-826-2692 or email: rzajac@mail.sal.ksu.edu or check their website at: http://www.sal.ksu.edu

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