Study of nature's machinery takes center s...( echnology that's been evolving for bill...)

Researchers, student and faculty from institutions throughout the Gulf Coast region, as well as from industry, will use the UH-based NMR device, Pettitt said.

UH President Arthur K. Smith and Vice President for Research Arthur C. Vailas, along with UH scientists and international NMR scholars, are expected to attend the facility's opening and ribbon-cutting on Friday, May 16.

On Saturday, May 17, the First Houston High Field NMR Symposium will be held on the UH campus. Ad Bax, chief of the section on biophysical NMR spectroscopy at the National Institutes of Health and one of the foremost experts in biomolecular NMR, will speak at 8:45 a.m. on new opportunities in NMR studies. The May 17 symposium is free and open to the public. It will be held in Room 232 of Philip G. Hoffman Hall at UH. Registration and symposium information, including speakers and their topics, is available on the Web at http://www.chem.uh.edu/imd/nmrcon/

The event is sponsored by the IMD and the W. M. Keck Center for Computational and Structural Biology via the Gulf Coast Consortia.

The NMR machine at UH is so large that it must be housed in a specially-built two-story room in a former TV studio on campus. At the heart of the instrument is a magnet so powerful that it can erase credit cards, ruin watches and affect people with pacemakers who come too close. A specially-marked carpet and warnings within the facility clearly indicate safety zones.

The NMR joins other state-of-the-art research equipment in the IMD.

"The Institute for Molecular Design at UH is one of the oldest in the country devoted to the study of how we design molecules," Pettitt said. "
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Contact: Amanda Siegfried
asiegfried@uh.edu
713-743-8192
University of Houston
9-May-2003