CSD Heroes: Frank Fronczek
Our fourth CSD Hero is Frank Fronczek, currently 7th in our annual CSD author statistics.
Frank Fronczek is Director of the X-ray Facility at Louisiana State University and a Fellow of the American Crystallographic Association. He was a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley after receiving his PhD at Caltech, with Dick Marsh (trained by Linus Pauling) and Bill Schaefer.(1)
We would like to thank Frank by highlighting some of his key contributions to the CSD.
Frank R. Fronczek and the CSD
Frank is currently 7th in our annual list of most prolific authors in the CSD with over 3,300 entries dating back to 1975. His busiest year was 2015 with a massive 465 submitted entries, 384 of which were published as CSD Communications.
Frank is also one of our “CSD Communications Heroes”, having published 1,445 CSD Communications overall. His 1st CSD Communication was published in 1995, CSD Entry SUCCIN08, https://dx.doi.org/10.5517/cc45q44. Frank’s 1000th CSD Communication, published in 2015, we have nicknamed “The CSD Man”, CSD Entry: XURZAN, is shown below.
CSD Entry: XURZAN, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.5517/cc1jv0yb
A graph showing the growth of Frank’s CSD Communications per year is shown below.
A graph showing the growth of Frank’s entries as CSD Communications in the CSD with new additions that year shown in darker blue
Frank has published structures in 116 different journals with 1,675 unique co-authors. A pie chart showing his variety of different journal contributions is shown below.
Graph showing distribution of Frank’s contributions to different journals.
A graph showing the growth of Frank’s entries in the CSD per year is shown below.
A graph showing the growth of Frank’s entries in the CSD with new additions that year shown in darker blue.
Frank’s structures are diverse and include 67 different element types, a massive 219,474 atomic coordinates, and cover 77 different space groups. One of his largest structures in terms of the number of atomic coordinates (822) is CSD Entry: MIPYAM,published in Chemistry-A European Journal.
Frank’s structure with the largest number of atomic coordinates (822) – CSD Entry MIPYAM (https://dx.doi.org/10.5517/ccpmmlh)
His entries are more in the organic discipline (74%, 2,490 entries) than the metal-organic discipline (26%, 877 entries). Frank’s structures have an average R-factor of 4.6, below the average R-factor of the entire CSD and 21% of his structures have modelled disorder.
Infographic showing a breakdown of Frank’s structures
We have enjoyed browsing through Frank’s structures, each structure is valuable individually and collectively they contain a wealth of data that can be used by scientists worldwide. Thank you, Frank, for all your efforts and for all your wonderful structures!
Get involved
This is the 4th blog in our series of blog posts featuring the most prolific authors in the CSD which highlight some statistics and structures to celebrate their achievements and thank them for their phenomenal contribution. If you would like to share stories about these crystallographers, some of their fascinating structures or tell us about your heroes of the CSD tweet us @ccdc_cambridge using hashtag #CSDHeroes19
(1) https://www.lsu.edu/science/chemistry/news/spotlight/bs_graduates/frank_fronczek.php