
An Update from the Chairman, Professor Stéphane Parola
Planning for Sol-Gel 2021, which will be held in the 2000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage city of Lyon, is now well underway. Led by Stéphane Parola (ENS Lyon, CNRS, University Lyon 1), Geneviève Chadeyron (ICCF, CNRS, University Clermont Auvergne, SIGMA Clermont) Xavier Cattoën (NÉEL Institute, CNRS, University Grenoble Alpes), Philippe Belleville (CEA) and Clément Sanchez (Collège de France, Paris Sorbonne, French Academy of Science), the 2021 meeting will continue the rich tradition established by the International Sol-Gel Conference series that began in 1981, with the first such meeting in Padova, Italy. Since the inaugural workshop, the conference has now been held in 13 different countries, highlighting the remarkable cultural diversity of our international community.
Every host city and nation over a period spanning 40 years has contributed its own unique “flavour” to the conference series, and the Lyon meeting is set to further enrich that compelling scientific and cultural tradition. It will gather many of the world’s leading experts in the fields of materials/nanomaterials, inorganics, hybrids and polymers prepared by soft-chemical routes. Academic and industrial aspects of sol-gel science and technology, from the laboratory to the marketplace, will be addressed in the heart of the French Chemistry Valley.
Plenary speakers for the conference will include Professors Markus Antonietti (Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany); Bruce Dunn (UCLA, USA); Julia Greer (Caltech, USA); Krzysztof Matyjaszewski (Carnegie Mellon University, USA); and Dongyuan Zhao (Fudan University, Shanghai, China).
For more details, please visit the conference website: http://solgel2021.fr. A short video is also available at: https://youtu.be/_6zphZfAjSo. The Organisers look forward to welcoming you to Lyon in 2021!