Introduction

The Bloomsbury campus of University College London played host to nearly 500 delegates from 31 different countries for the eighth international conference in the biennial series organised by the Materials Chemistry Forum of the Royal Society of Chemistry. 

MC8 provided a showcase for materials chemistry which has now come of age, as a truly interdisciplinary field with "chemistry" at its centre, but extending seamlessly into biology, medicine, physics, nanotechnology and materials engineering.

The programme

The meeting extended over four full days. It was opened by Malcolm Grant, Provost and President of UCL, who welcomed the delegates to MC8: he stressed the importance of chemistry as a central discipline relevant to the growth and development of existing and emerging technologies.

Each morning of the conference began with a plenary lecture. The first presentation by Paul Alivisatos from UC Berkeley covered latest results from his group on designing shaped and functionalised nanoparticles and nanoparticle clusters for  biomedical and other materials applications. He was followed by Roald Hoffmann from Cornell, who described how insights from molecular bonding would lead to studies of new chemical behaviour in solid state materials compressed to extreme conditions of high pressure and temperature. Next came Heino Finkelmann from Freiburg, who described how coupling between various mechanical, thermal and optical effects in polymer elastomers and liquid crystals could lead to new devices, including switches and actuators and artificial muscle tissue. Finally, George Whitesides from Harvard described a series of simple and elegant experiments that shed new light on the "old" problem of how "electrets", or particles with permanent electrical charges or dipoles, work and interact with each other and with their environment. The results and applications range from paint mixing to xerography and thunderclouds; the new physical insights will allow electret properties to be controlled by chemistry.

The sessions were arranged around theme areas, and collected into topical symposia.  Each morning and afternoon session was opened by a Keynote speaker, followed by 7-8 contributed talks in the area. For the full conference programme, please download the pdf from the bottom of this page. For more detailed descriptions of each session, please use the Themes In this Section link.

There were nearly 200 posters presented at the meeting. See the pdf at the bottom of the page for all presenters and titles.

Attendees commented on the very high quality of both the oral and poster presentations, from both "younger" and "more established" speakers.

For more detailed information on the topics covered please read the MC8 conference report by Paul McMillan.

MC9

We look forward to MC9 being held in August 2009 as an embedded conference within the 42nd IUPAC Congress in Glasgow, UK.