News

Scientific research leaders in materials science, chemistry, drug discovery, and neuroscience will speak at the University of California, San Diego 2003 Maria Goeppert-Mayer Interdisciplinary Symposium. The annual meeting, named in honor of the co-winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics, highlights fundamental, interdisciplinary scientific achievements. This year's meeting, the eighth in the series, will be held 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., March 1 at Robinson Auditorium on the UCSD campus.

"This event has struck a chord in the research community with its emphasis on interdisciplinary science," said Kim Baldridge, an adjunct full professor of theoretical chemistry at UCSD and director of integrative computational sciences at UCSD's San Diego Supercomputer Center. She founded the symposium in 1996. "This year, our invited speakers will discuss subjects ranging from drug development to understanding the brain, and a variety of fascinating topics in between," said Baldridge. In addition, the meeting features nearly 30 scientific research posters presented by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from UCSD and other academic institutions.

Goeppert-Mayer was a professor of physics at UCSD from 1960 until her death in 1972. When she received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for her work on the shell theory of the nucleus, she was the only woman to receive that award since Marie Curie in 1903.

The annual symposium in Goeppert-Mayer's honor was established in 1996 by Baldridge. It is sponsored by SDSC, the National Science Foundation and its National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, the National Biomedical Computational Resource, the American Chemical Society, and the new UCSD Center for Theoretical and Biological Physics.

The program for this year's symposium is given below; more information is available at the MGM Symposium Web site.

SPEAKERS
(8:15 a.m. - 1 p.m., Robinson Auditorium)

• Wanda Andreoni, IBM Research, Zurich Research Laboratory:
  Toward the Ab Initio Design of Functional Materials and Drugs
  Session Chair: Joanna Trylska, UCSD

• Janet DelBene, Department of Chemistry, Youngstown State University:
  Two-Bond 19F-15N Spin-Spin Coupling Constants (2hJF-N) across F-H-N Hydrogen
  Bonds in Neutral and Cationic Complexes
  Session Chair: Leah-Nani Alconcel, Caltech

• Cynthia A. Maryanoff, Chemical/Pharmaceutical Development, Johnson & Johnson
  Making Drugs: From Discovery to Market
  Session Chair: Janet Newman, Robodesign

• Maryann Martone, Department of Neurosciences, UCSD:
  From Molecules to Brains: Strategies for Acquiring and Integrating Multiscale Brain
  Imaging Data
  Session Chair: Hima Joshi, USD

• Madeleine Joullie, Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania:
  Total Synthesis of Natural Products
  Session Chair: Valentina Molteni, Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation

POSTER SESSION

(1 to 3:30 p.m., Robinson Auditorium)

Researchers from UCSD, San Diego State University/Tijuana, Caltech, and The Scripps Research Institute will discuss their latest results.

The symposium Web page is at http://www.sdsc.edu/MGM/.

Registration is at http://www.sdsc.edu/MGM/reg2003.html.

A biography of Maria Goeppert-Mayer is at http://www.sdsc.edu/MGM/previous/mgm2002/bio.html.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer manuscript collection at UCSD Mandeville Special Collections Library http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/testing/html/mss0020e.html

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Rex Graham, San Diego Supercomputer Center,
rgrahm@sdsc.com