Founding Meeting – San Jose CA – Friday Oct 28, 2016

November 16, 2016

Our founding IVAN meeting took place as planned on Friday, October 28th, at the Fairmont hotel in San Jose. We thank all those who attended and everyone in IVAN who has given their support. We now look forward to our first conference meeting before the Asilomar ENC, on March 25th, 2017. That meeting is now in planning and we look forward to many participants.

We had a relaxed and important meeting in San Jose. The catering at the Fairmont was great and MR Resources was generous with the food and drink! We began at 10:00 AM after a catered breakfast and the reception went past 6:00 PM. There were about 40 of us at the meeting, with a good representation from west coast and bay area universities, including Stanford, Cal Tech, the University of California campuses and Gilead Pharmaceuticals. We also had several out-of-state participants, including Iowa State and Boston University.

We now are in the process of setting up a new IVAN web site, https://www.ivanmr.com. We plan to post talks, photos and video from the meeting at this site. Look for a future email when the website goes live.

Jon Webb of MR Resources spoke first about his goals for IVAN. He reminded us of the early history of Varian and then went on to discuss the Agilent exit and recent events. We in the NMR and Varian-Agilent communities represent a unique group among users of scientific instruments. Jon is convinced – and even passionate – that there is more we can do with our Varian and Agilent instrumentation and software and that we need to remain together as a group.

Dan Iverson spoke about the new release of OpenVnmrJ and the history of its development at Agilent and through the VOSSG group (VnmrJ Open-Source Steering Committee). OpenVnmrJ1.1 is available on the Github web site and can be readily installed on existing RHEL 6.3 – or equivalently CENTOS – systems with VnmrJ4.2. John Ryan at Agilent now offers a kickstart disk for CENTOS 6.8 through Spinsights that can be used with more recent PC’s.

Both Dan and Krish Krishnamurthy discussed a number of development ideas for OpenVnmrJ during the meeting. Both Dan and Krish have full-time software businesses and are in a position to provide support and do software development.

At lunch Michele Bodner chaired a discussion of service issues. Jon mentioned how important it is to preserve spare parts, especially of the newer direct-drive vintage. MR Resources does a good business buying and installing used consoles and magnets. No one should consider scrapping an old system without making the effort to get it or its parts to new owners, including Mercury’s and INOVA’s. We also discussed the uncertain future of Spinsights and what we might need to do if Agilent drops it at the currently planned date, June 2017.

After lunch Krish chaired an open discussion of applications, with contributions by Dan Iverson, Dave Russell, Dave Rice, Michele Bodner and Geroge Gray. Krish presented new information about non-uniform sampling from the recent SMASH meeting and about his area interest, CRAFT. Dave Rice discussed Veripulse and automation with material from Dave Russell, who was called away at the last moment. George Gray and Dave Rice also briefly discussed BioPack and SolidsPack.

We are off to a good start. All interested Varian-Agilent users – managers, students, faculty and PI’s are encouraged to join IVAN, whether or not you plan to attend a meeting. Register at https://www.mrr.com. It just takes a few minutes, there is no cost and you will be linked to the Varian-Agilent community.

MR Resources and the IVAN Executive Committee

Founding Executive Committee of IVAN: Michele Bodner, Tim Burrow, George Gray, Christine Hofstetter, Dan Iverson, Paul Keifer, Krish Krishnamurthy, Dave Rice, Dave Russell, Mike Strain, Shellie Hammond (MRR) and Jon Webb (Owner MRR)

Krish chaired an afternoon session