Eighth Annual Maria Goeppert-Mayer Symposium Set for March 1 at UCSD
(from the SDSC archives: http://www.npaci.edu/Press/03/022803_mgm.html)

Maria Goeppert-MayerScientific 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.