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Abstract:
Eleventh Electronic Computational Chemistry Conference Will Run Through April

Monmouth University to host online international computational chemistry conference

West Long Branch, NJ | Posted on March 30th, 2007

Monmouth University will host the 11th Electronic Computational Chemistry Conference during April. The conference will take place entirely on the Internet.

Robert Q. Topper, an associate professor and chair of Monmouth University's Department of Chemistry, Medical Technology, and Physics, says ECCC11 will be held online during the month of April 2007, at eccc.monmouth.edu. ECCC11 is open to scientists from around the world and is completely free. Fifty presentations are being prepared by scientists from 23 different nations for online discussion and exchange of cutting-edge research in computational chemistry and molecular modeling.

"Computational chemistry is focused on the use of computational and theoretical approaches to the study of drugs and drug activity, nanotechnology, and all other aspects of chemistry and biology," Topper says. "The ECCC is the longest-running peer-reviewed online research conference in the natural sciences. Its virtual nature and free registration provide an opportunity for scientists from all countries - including developing countries - to present their papers for peer review and online discussion, and it brings important work to scientists' attention that they otherwise might not have known about."

Topper adds that "the ECCC is an amazing experiment. It continues to exist largely due to the goodwill and hard work of scientists and sponsoring companies from around the globe who volunteer their time, energy, and resources to making each conference a unique and valuable resource for the international community of computational chemists."

The authors of outstanding ECCC11 presentations will be awarded thousands of dollars worth of software for molecular modeling and drug design donated by SimBioSys (www.simbiosys.ca), Scientific Computing and Modeling (www.scm.com), and Synergix (www.molecular-conceptor.com).

The last conference (ECCC10) was held in April 2005 and drew over 250 participants from around the world. At that conference, 54 HTML-based presentations of research and scholarship in computational chemistry and cheminformatics were actively discussed. The ECCC10 Proceedings appeared in a special issue of the journal Theoretical Chemistry Accounts in February 2007.

Since the conference is asynchronous but happens over an entire month, there is an interactive week from April 16 through 23 during which participants post questions and authors of the conference papers answer at least once a day. The rest of the time, participants review the presentations and continue to engage in discussions with the authors and each other. All participants can engage equally in discussions, regardless of time zone.

"Some of the success of the ECCC can be attributed partly to the monitoring and follow-up we do to ensure that the science is currrent and sound, and that presenters answer all questions posed to them in a timely manner," says Topper, who is co-organizing his sixth ECCC this year with Olga Dmitrenko, a senior research associate at the University of Delaware. The ECCC was originally developed in 1994 by Steven Bachrach (Trinity University), who organized the first five conferences.

Peer review of the abstracts was carried out by the Scientific Organizing Committee, made up of a panel of respected computational and theoretical scientists: Noah W. Allen, University of North Carolina-Asheville (USA); Thomas R. Cundari, University of North Texas (USA); Walter M. F. Fabian, Karl-Franzens Universität Graz (Austria); John McKelvey, McKelvey Computational Chemistry (USA); Sudhakar V. Pamidighantam, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (USA); and Jens Spanget-Larsen, Roskilde University (Denmark). After the conference has ended, an electronic booklet of the accepted abstracts will be published online.

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Contacts:
Monmouth University
400 Cedar Avenue
West Long Branch • New Jersey • 07764-1898
732-571-3400

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