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Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy plays a unique role in contemporary Chemistry, with applications ranging from solids materials and petroleum catalysts, to solution biomolecules and tissues in vivo.  NMR also plays a unique role in the structural elucidation of organic compounds, and is an essential component of drug discovery processes in both academia and industry.  Besides its widespread analytical capabilities a distinguishing feature of NMR is its reliance on purely quantum mechanical objects —the nuclear spin and its quantized interactions with the local environment— as tools to extract its unique kind of information.  This has made chemical physics in general and spin physics in particular, an integral part of NMR's development. Recent years in particular have witnessed the possibility of analyzing ever larger molecular assemblies, enhanced sensitivities, and a widening array of potential nuclear species to probe. Another crucial landmark in the history of NMR has been the spin-off of magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, a crucial tool in contemporary health diagnosis and research. The purpose of the present Symposium was to assemble a world-class group of experts in both the development and application of all these aspects of NMR, to discuss their latest finding in the field. The Symposium was a success exceeding our expectations, including well-attended sessions on all aspects of magnetic resonance, and MRI-oriented sessions including joint sessions with other ACS divisions.

A particularly interesting account witnessing the Symposium's success, can be gathered from the special cover-picture article that the Chemical & Engineering News magazine devoted to it, in its October 27, 2008 issue (attached).

The final program of the symposium funded by this grant included

Sunday AM

1. Frontiers in Solid-State Biomolecular NMR (B. Meier, ETH, Chair)

8:20 Hartmut Oschkinat (Berlin)

9:00 Ben Wylie (Urbana)

9:20 Ann McDermott (Columbia)

10:00 Intermission

10:20 Chad Rienstra (Urbana)

11:00 Tatyana Polenova (Delaware)

11:20 W. Qiang (E. Lansing)

11:40 Heather Fredricks-Schmidt (Urbana)

Sunday PM

2. Mag Res in Mat Sci (B. Chmelka, UCSB, Chair)

1:20 Clare Grey (SUNY-SB)

2:00 Michael Davis (College Station)

2:20 Marek Pruski (Ames)

3:00 Intermission

3:20 Karl Mueller (College Station)

4:00 Son-Jong Hwang (Pasadena)

4:20 Rob Schurko (Windsor)

5:00 Lucienne Buannic (SUNY-SB)

5:20 Caleb Strepka (College Station)

Monday AM.

3. Folding and Misfolding by NMR (C. Rienstra, Urbana, Chair)

8:00 Rob Tycko (NIH)

8:40 Beat Meier (ETH)

9:20 Song-I Han (UCSB)

9:40 Jaime L. Curtis-Fisk (E. Lansing)

10:00 Intermission

10:20 John Christodoulou (UC-London)

11:00 Jean Baum (Rutgers)

11:40 W. Trent Franks (Urbana)

Monday PM

4. NMR Perspectives on Nanocomposites and Biopolymers (M. Hong, Chair)

1:20 Gary Drobny (Seattle)

2:00 Asher Schmidt (Technion)

2:40 Daniel Topgaard  (LŸnd)

3:00 Intermission

3:20 Ruth Stark (Staten Island)

4:00 Brad Chmelka (UCSB)

4:40 Robert Maxwell (Ames)

Tuesday AM

5. Frontiers in Solution State Biomolecular NMR (W. Warren, Duke, Chair)

8:00 Angela Gronenborn (Pittsburgh)

8:40 James Prestegard (Athens)

9:20 Patrick Loria (Yale)

10:00 Intermission

11:00 Jesus Vasquez-Rodriguez (Burnham)

10:20 A. Joshua Wand (Penn)

11:40 Anne Dhulesia  (EPFL)

Tuesday 1:20 – 5:00          6. Emerging Methods in Small Molecule NMR (L. Frydman, Weizmann, Chair)

1:20 Malcolm Levitt (Southampton)

2:00 Eriks Kupce (Varian Ltd.)

2:40 Sungsool Wi (VaTech)

3:00 Intermission

3:20 Cynthia Larive (UC-Riverside)

4:00 Erik Munson (U Kansas)

4:40 Damien Jeannerat (U Geneva)

Wednesday 8:00 – 12:00       7. Pushing the NMR Sensitivity Envelope (L. Frydman, Weizmann, Chair)

8:00 Robert Griffin (MIT)

8:40 Sophia Hayes (Wash U)

9:00 Dan Weitekamp (Caltech)

9:40 Chris Hilty (Texas AM)

10:00 Intermission

10:20 Arno Kentgens (Nijmengen)

11:00 Judith Herzfeld (Brandeis)

11:20 Andrew Webb (Leiden)

Wednesday PM

8. ACS HIST award for Paul Lauterbur (C. Grey, SUNY-SB, Chair)

1:20 Jerry Ackerman (MGH)

2:00 Warren Warren (Duke)

2:40 Felix Wehrli (Penn)

3:20 Intermission

3:40 Joseph Frank (SUNY SB)

4:20 Alexj Jerschow (NYU)

5:00 Louis-S. Bouchard (UCLA)

5:20 Jing Song

Wednesday Evening         Poster Session

Thursday AM

9. Beating the 800-pound Gorilla: NMR of Membrane-Bound Proteins (M. Hong, Iowa, Chair)

8:20 Stanley Opella (UCSD)

9:00 Sarah Cady (Ames)

9:20 Marc Baldus (Goettingen)

10:00 Intermission

10:20 Tim Cross (FSU)

11:00 Joanna Long (Gainsville)

11:20 Rachel Martin (UC-Irvine)

11:40 Marc-AndrŽ Gagnon

Foreign speakers whose attendance was supported in part by the PRF-SE grant, included

Please list foreign speakers for whom support is sought.

Name  Prof. Marc Baldus
   Affiliation Max-Planck-Institut, Gottingen, Germany

Title of presentation: Studying structure and function in bilayers by solid-state NMR spectroscopy

Description of presentation: Highlights of Prof. Baldus's latest methodological developments in the NMR of solids and semi-solids

Name  Prof. John Christodoulou
   Affiliation  University College - London, UK

Title of presentation: Life on the Edge: The Origins and Proliferation of Protein Misfolding Diseases

Description of presentation:  Uses of NMR to follow protein folding, given by one of the top-most world experts in this "hottest" of fields in biophysical chemistry

Name  Prof. Arno Kentgens
    Affiliation Radbaud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Title of presentation: Developing NMR Methodologies for Functional Materials Research

Description of presentation:
   Methodological frontiers of what in all likelihood will become the NMR hardware of the next decade

Name  Dr. Eriks Kupce
    Affiliation  Varian Ltd. Oxford, UK

Title of presentation: Hyperdimensional NMR Spectroscopy

Description of presentation:
   On how NMR acquisitions are pushed to ever shorter timescales and increasing dimensionalities, and the analytical possibilities thus opened

Name  Prof. Beat Meier
   Affiliation
   ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Title of presentation: NMR studies of macromolecular structure and dynamics in solids

Description of presentation:
   New applications in macromolecular characterizations of insoluble toxic polymers, as made possible by a new understanding of solids NMR

Name  Prof. Malcolm Levitt
   Affiliation  University of Southampton, UK

Title of presentation: Double-Quantum NMR of Bathorhodopsin: the First Step in Vision

Description of presentation:
   A description about Levitt's long-standing NMR investigations on the physical chemistry of vision

Name  Prof. Hartmut Oschkinat
   Affiliation  Free University, Berlin, Germany__________________

Title of presentation: Structure Determination of Transporters by Solid-State NMR

Description of presentation:   A state-of-the-art description of what is currently feasible in structural NMR characterizations