HKL Research, Inc. is a privately held company founded in 1995 by Dr. Zbyszek Otwinowski and Dr. Wladek Minor, located in Charlottesville, VA.
The company was established primarily to simplify the distribution of the HKL-2000 and HKL program suites. With the growing popularity of these programs, we saw an opportunity to offer support and assistance to the user community.
The first versions of Denzo and Scalepack, two of the three main components of the HKL program suite, were written by Dr. Otwinowski at the University of Chicago between 1983 and 1988, and then at Yale University until 1994. Currently, Zbyszek Otwinowski is a Professor at the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Wladek Minor wrote the initial version of the XDisplayF program – the third main component of the HKL package, while at Purdue University between 1988 and 1995. Since 1996, the display program, renamed xdisp, has been further developed at the University of Virginia. Dr. Minor is now a Harrison Distinguished Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics at the University of Virginia, School of Medicine, in Charlottesville.
Many utility programs were added over time and the HKL package evolved into a more advanced and extended version - the HKL-2000 program. Subsequently, the HKL-2000 program was redesigned to interact with several other macromolecular crystallographic computer programs to add structure determination capabilities. The new package was named HKL-3000.
Every year since 1997, HKL Research has funded an award for the most innovative M.Sc. thesis at the Physics Department of the University of Warsaw (the Alma Mater of both authors).