Blog CSD Educators

As part of the CSD Educators series we are proud to feature a special introduction from CCDC fellow, Greg Ferrence, on a blog written by Anthony L. Fernandez. 

Welcome to CSD University!

We are thrilled to introduce you to our new collection of on-demand educational resources: CSD University (CSDU) – or actually, to the first module of this collection. In this blog you will learn more about the CSDU idea, format (which includes a completion certificate), and the first module, Visualisation 101.

Are you the campus CSD-Enterprise licence owner? Do you want to know more about how the CSD academic licence works? Then this overview of academic licencing and tools is for you. I’m a user support scientist. In this short blog and accompanying video, I walk through how to activate and use your CSD licence and how to assist individual users with their activations. In the second half, I cover training and support opportunities – including tutorials available within the tools and those available online – to help you advance your institution's structural science.

For this CSD Educators blog, our guest is Christine Zardecki, from the RCSB PDB. This year, the Protein Data Bank (PDB) is celebrating their 50th anniversary and we are delighted to share with you a bit about their journey in education and the building of the PDB-101 educational resources.

For this CSD Educators blog, I have the pleasure to introduce to you Prof. Alessia Bacchi, from the University of Parma in Italy. In this blog, Alessia will talk to us about her recent experience teaching "virtually" the use of Mercury and the CSD in high schools, with the goal to help students and teachers with the learning and teaching of three-dimensional concepts, such as the geometry of molecules.

It is my pleasure to welcome Dr Natalia Alvarez as our guest for this CSD Educators blog. This is actually a welcome back, as Natalia was a guest editor for the CCDC in 2016, talking about the OpenLab in Uruguay. In this blog instead, Natalia will talk to us about her journey in crystallography, how she first met the CSD (spoiler: it was not love at first sight!), her contribution in regional crystallography schools with insights on how to teach the use of crystallographic databases, in particular the CSD.

It is my pleasure to welcome Professor Dean Johnston from Otterbein University for our next entry in the CSD Educator series. Dean is an avid user and champion of the CSD, from his experience as a graduate student growing crystals to integrating the CSD in his lectures in inorganic chemistry. Dean developed the Symmetry@Otterbein online resource to showcase structures with interesting symmetry; a resource that has since been included in the Database of Crystallographic Online Resources (DECOR). In 2016, scientists from the CCDC facilitated a workshop at Otterbein University where Dean had free access to his school’s 3D printer which provided an opportunity for every attendee to design and print out a 3D model.

For this CSD Educators blog it is my pleasure to welcome Dr Samuel Tetteh from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. Samuel holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cape Coast and is now a teacher and researcher at the University. I first met Samuel at a workshop in Kumasi in Ghana in 2016 and it has been fantastic to see how Samuel has gone on to use the Cambridge Structural Database to provide a more visual and engaging way to teach structural chemistry to his students. Samuel also employs the CSD in his research involving the study of structural and bonding properties of transition metal complexes and has published a number of research papers in this area. In this blog Samuel will tell us more about his teaching experiences and how crystal structures have helped him revolutionalise how he teaches chemistry. Samuel will also be speaking at our Educators UGM in March so if you want to find out more or have any questions for Samuel then you can register here.

For this CSD Educators blog it is my pleasure to welcome Marielle Agbahoungbata and to highlight the work she has done with her colleagues to help establish the X-TechLab in Benin. Marielle gained her PhD in inorganic chemistry and since 2014 has been involved in developing a network of crystallographers in Africa. Marielle is the coordinator of the X-TechLab in Benin which aims to provide hands-on training in X-ray techniques in order to provide African scientists with the means to develop solutions for the sustainable development of the continent. The first training session that X-TechLab team organised was held in May 2019 and I was lucky enough to join the second session in Benin in November 2019. That session saw a classroom full of participants from Benin and across Africa learn about X-ray diffraction. During the sessions on the Cambridge Structural Database the students were engaged and eager to learn and I felt privileged to be a part of it.  A few months ago, the CCDC participated in our second X-TechLab training sessions, this time remotely. Again, it was fantastic to see how engaged the students were. In this blog Marielle will tell us more about the X-TechLab and how the team is striving to disseminate science and bridge scientific and entrepreneurship communities through the initiative.

For this CSD Educators blog we wanted to share with you our experience hosting our first CCDC Virtual Workshops. The CCDC Virtual Workshops are interactive live sessions aimed at training our community remotely in using the CSD Software, and we launched the first series of three 90-minutes sessions in November 2020. We wanted to deliver a proper workshop, where you had the chance to try exercises yourself, ask us your questions, discuss together the issues you encounter and interact with us. After much thinking, planning and experimenting, we brought to you the CCDC Virtual Workshops.

In this blog you will read more about the format, the numbers, and what we have learnt from this experience.