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<title>Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve</title>
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Ralf is a crystallographer. He has a degree in Mineralogy (<a href="http://www.mineralogie.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/englisch/mineralogie_v2.0_eng.htm">Bochum,
Germany</a>), and a Ph.D. in Crystallography (<a href="http://www.kristall.ethz.ch/LFK/">ETH
Zurich</a>
, Switzerland). Real Mineralogists and Crystallographers run experiments with
x-rays and hardware that is not normally associated with C++ and Boost.
However, when Ralf kept breaking the expensive experimental equipment too
often, he decided that he would cause less damage as a computational
crystallographer.
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Being a scientist, Ralf spent most of his life programming in Fortran, the
great grand-father of all good programming languages (if you know Backus-Naur
you know the name of the <a href="http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/backus.html">
inventor of Fortran</a>). Ralf is a co-author of the <a href="http://cns.csb.yale.edu/">
CNS</a> Fortran program that is very popular in structural biology. When he
learned that a real programmer can write Fortran in any language, Ralf knew
that it was time for him to learn C++. Of course, absorbing four decades of
progress in the field of computer science all at once crashed his brain. To be
able to deal with the challenge, he spawned two child processes and named them
Lisa and Anna. To see Lisa, click on the picture and turn your monitor by 180
degrees around the view axis. (Other pictures of <a href="http://cci.lbl.gov/~rwgk/Lisa-Roza-Illes/">
Lisa</a> and <a href="http://cci.lbl.gov/~rwgk/Anna-Rhona-Illes/">Anna</a>
do not require gymnastics with the monitor.)
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Right now, Ralf is working for the <a href="http://cci.lbl.gov/">Computational
Crystallography Initiative</a> at the <a href="http://www.lbl.gov/">Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory</a> in California. The goal of this initiative
is to write a software system for high-throughput protein crystal structure
determination, also known as <a href="http://www.nigms.nih.gov/news/announcements/psi.html">
Structural Genomics</a>. Surprisingly, the gestation period for such a system
turns out to be much longer than it was for Lisa and Anna. However, pre-natal
diagnosis already revealed that Python and C++ are the parents-to-be. For an
ultra-sound image of the new system at its early developmental stage <a href="http://cctbx.sourceforge.net/">
click here</a>
.
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