Celebrating 100 years of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute

On 24–28 July, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) held its Centenary Congress, in honour of its 100th anniversary. It was attended by several members of staff. 

The congress took place in Melbourne and was the biggest ever chemistry conference to have taken place in Australia. It was held in collaboration with several partner conferences, including the 17th Asian Chemical Congress, which resulted in a huge gathering of Australian and international chemists.

The Royal Society of Chemistry was involved in a number of ways, including hosting a reception for our Australian and New Zealand members and other guests.

"The reception was brilliant", said Sarah Thomas, Senior Programme Manager, International Engagement. "There was such a buzz of conversation and it was really nice to meet the Australian and New Zealand members – I think they really enjoyed the opportunity to meet up and mingle."

Alan Bond, chair of the RSC Australia local section, was instrumental to organising the reception, and gave a speech to the assembled members. He spoke to us about what it was like to bring representatives from the Royal Society of Chemistry together with local members.

"The RSC Australian Group liaising with the RACI has a synergistic effect in advancing chemistry and the profile of the discipline, both in Australia and the UK, for example by the presentation of the 2017 RSC Australasian Lectureship by Neil Barnett at this meeting", he said.

RSC Council member, Tom Welton, also gave a speech congratulating RACI on their centenary and presented a gift to the President of RACI, Peter Junk.

Huge team effort

Roger Stapleford, CEO of RACI, masterminded the whole congress and was crucial to organising our involvement. "Without him there would have been no congress", said Sarah. "He was the real driving force."

Roger said: "The Congress was a great success due to a huge team effort. In the end there were 26 separate technical organising committees and if they had not been prepared to work together the whole enterprise would have crashed and burned.

"One of our goals was to break the silo mentality of the various branches of the chemical scientists and we were pleased to see this happening, with many joint sessions occurring and people mixing at the multitude of social events.

"A second goal was to move away from a purely academic based chemical conference and get more involvement of industry and commerce. Again we succeeded with the involvement of the Chemeca conference, a HS&E meeting and the SCI three day seminar pulling in a lot of non-academic delegates.

"The final success was the involvement of school students. With the pulling power of Sir Martyn Poliakoff we had almost 500 senior school students attending on the outreach day for a first-hand experience of what chemistry and chemists are all about."