Save the Date!

Dear ICDD Members:

Please join us the week of 11 – 15 March 2024 for the Annual ICDD Spring Meetings – a hybrid event. In general, the week will follow the traditional format:

Monday – Committees of the Board and the Board of Directors
Tuesday – Plenary Session, social event and dinner
Wednesday – Technical Subcommittees
Thursday – Technical Committee Meeting and Annual Meeting of the Membership
Friday – Board of Directors

General information regarding the meeting schedule, agendas, plenary speakers and host hotel will be posted on ICDD’s website soon. For those who are unable to travel to ICDD, the Zoom platform will be used for virtual participation.

We are looking forward to a great Spring Meeting! See you at ICDD Headquarters or on Zoom!

Denise Zulli, Corporate Secretary
on behalf of the Staff of ICDD

Social Event

ICDD members, staff, and guests are invited to our 2024 Spring Meetings Social Event on 12 March 2024!

This year’s event will begin with a visit to the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia, PA. The Wagner Free Institute of Science is a rare survival—a museum and educational institution that remains nearly unchanged from the nineteenth century in both the arrangement of its specimens and in its mission. The Institute was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior in December of 1990.

After a tour and talk at the Wager Free Institute, we will return to the newly refurbished Best Western Plus Concordville in Glen Mills, PA. The evening will begin with our poster session, where members and guests will enjoy wine and cheese, share knowledge, catch up with old friends, and meet new ones. At the conclusion of the poster session, join us for a buffet dinner and dessert in the Alexander Ballroom.

Schedule:
12:00 pm: Lunch at ICDD
1:00 pm: Depart ICDD
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Visit to the Wagner Free Institute of Science
4:00 pm: Depart WFI
5:30 – 6:30 pm: Poster session and cocktail hour at Best Western Concordville
6:30 pm – 8:00 pm: Dinner in Alexander Ballroom

The Technical Committee Chair, Robert Dinnebier, encourages members to submit posters or displays for the poster session. The Poster Session and cocktail hour will be 5:30 – 6:30 pm on 12 March 2024 at Best Western Concordville.

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Abstracts

Guidelines for Preparing Abstracts:

Abstracts will be accessible on the ICDD website. If you do not want your abstract posted, please note your request in your email when you submit it.

Abstracts must not exceed one page in length and must include the title, author(s), affiliation(s), and the text. To provide uniformity, it is recommended that abstracts be prepared in Microsoft® Word, according to the following guidelines:

Abstract Format

• Paper Size: 8.5 x 11 inches; A4 paper must be formatted for 8.5 x 11 inches
• Size: Entire abstract, including title, author(s), affiliations(s), and text, must fit on one 8.5 x 11” page. Please allow a top margin of 1.5” and 1” margins on all other sides
• Font: Times or Times New Roman, 12 point
• Title: bold, centered, all uppercase (except where lowercase letters are needed for clarity)
• Text:
  • Should appear flush left; do not indent
  • Leave one blank line between the title and the author(s)
  • Author and affiliation, mixed upper and lowercase, centered; if there is more than one author, underline the presenting author’s name
  • Leave two blank lines before beginning text
  • A blank line is recommended between new paragraphs
  • Use line spacing sufficiently large enough to allow the abstract to be read easily, including subscripts, superscripts, and Greek letters

Submission

The preferred method of submitting your abstracts is in a PDF format via this ICDD submission form (closed).

However, if you require an alternate method, please contact Elizabeth Dempsey –
Email: dempsey@icdd.com or Tel: +610-325-9814.

Abstracts should be submitted no later than 27 February 2024.

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Posters

Poster Session Information:

The Technical Committee Chair, Robert Dinnebier, encourages members to submit posters or displays for the poster session.

Poster Guidelines

Poster boards are 40 inches high, 60 inches wide, and about 1/4 inch thick, comprised of foam board. Pins will be available to attach your poster to the foam boards. Please post your presentations approximately 15 minutes prior to the start of the session.

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E-POSTERS

In addition to the traditional poster session on Tuesday evening, poster presenters are invited to submit an electronic file of their poster for viewing at ICDD headquarters throughout meeting week. An e-Poster station will be positioned in the front lobby of the ICDD building giving members the opportunity to thoroughly study the poster presentations.

The following are guidelines for formatting and submitting your e-Poster to ICDD:

E-POSTER FORMAT:

1. Your poster file must be in full landscape format and be one page only.
2. Create your poster in PowerPoint (or equivalent).
3. Title: Bold, Center, Mixed upper and lower case.
4. Author(s), Affiliation(s), and Contact Author email Address: Center directly under Title. Leave one blank line after the
5. Contact Author’s email Address before beginning text of poster.
6. It is strongly recommended to use a 16:9 aspect ratio (widescreen), with a simple and clear typeface (Arial, Arial black, Calibri…) and regular text size not less than 28 for the body of the different sections (depending on the amount of data you will be adding and the design you are using). Try to avoid the use of red or green in fonts or backgrounds, as they are colors that are difficult to read.
7. Images/pictures or graphs, the suggested minimum resolution is 300 dpi. To check that they appear correctly on the final/printed version, zoom in at 100% and check the images, pictures and graphs. It is better to use high quality images/graphs when creating the poster and then convert it to PDF.
8. Provide clear labels or headings for each section of your presentation to avoid confusion.
9. Convert to PDF format
10. PDF file cannot exceed 10MB
11. Email the PDF as an attachment to Elizabeth Dempsey (dempsey@icdd.com) by 4 March 2024.

 

Keynote Speaker,
Dr. Paul R. Bartholomew
Quinnipiac University, Superb LLC, Hamden, CT, USA

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Technical Committee Meeting
Thursday, 14 March 2024
9:30am – 12:30pm EDT

Collecting Reference Spectra for the ICDD Raman Database

Dr. Paul R. Bartholomew, Quinnipiac University, Superb LLC

Collecting reference Raman spectra for mineral identification begins with obtaining mineral samples and verifying their species identity and ends with obtaining high quality Raman spectra from them. After quantifying a geoscientist’s “likelihood of encountering” for each mineral species the 600 highest on this scale were targeted for the initial release of the ICDD Raman Database. The time to achieve this target was reduced considerably by manually curating out of the RRUFF database high quality Raman spectra from fully verified samples. Completion of this process left 250 of the top 600 to collect new Raman spectra for. Obtaining samples of these 250 specific species from major regional museums has been surprisingly challenging – primarily due to a) lack of museum resources to verify donated specimens, and b) redefinition of minerals by the IMA years after specimens were labeled. Structural verification is being accomplished via an SCXRD instrument operated in powder mode. Compositional verification is being accomplished with an electron microprobe via either EDS standardless quantitation or full WDS quantitation.

Before Raman spectra collection could begin decisions had to be made about laser wavelengths, spectral range, spectral resolution, and calibration standards. Data collection has had to constantly adapt to variations in signal strength, photoluminescent interference, laser damage, and crystallographic orientation – the latter often meaning that more than one spectrum would be collected from the same sample.

A review of progress achieved to date will be presented!

Dr. Bartholomew received his B.S. in geology from the University of Minnesota, after which he completed a field-based M.S. and an experimental Ph.D., both at the University of British Columbia. Following his graduate work, he managed geoscience analytical facilities, at SUNY Stony Brook and at Yale. Today he teaches Earth Science part-time at Quinnipiac University and serves as chief scientist for his own geoscience technologies company, Superb LLC. His research interests have explored the mineralogy of metamorphosed mineral deposits including the discovery of 2 new minerals which he named for his undergraduate mineralogy professor, Dr. Tibor Zoltai, and his graduate advisor, Dr. Hugh Greenwood. For the past 15 years, however, his research has increasingly focused on optimizing Raman spectroscopy for routine mineral identification with the objective of enabling Raman to become a universally adopted technology within the geoscience community. The products of this work include 3 patents for Raman technologies. He is presently working with ICDD to establish a Raman reference spectral library for routine mineral identification.

Hotel Information:

Best Western Plus Concordville Hotel

Hotel Address: 675 Conchester Highway, Glen Mills, Pennsylvania,19342, USA
Toll Free Phone Number (US & Canada): 1(800) 780-7234
Hotel Direct Phone Number: (610) 358-9400

Check-In:         4:00 pm Eastern Time
Check-Out:      11:00 am Eastern Time

Reservations can be made directly with the hotel, unless you require daily transportation service to and from ICDD using the hotel’s shuttle service. Guests requiring a hotel reservation AND shuttle service should contact Denise Zulli to make the reservation on their behalf: zulli@icdd.com.