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46463-SE
Structure and Dynamics at the Liquid-Liquid Interface, ACS National Meeting, March 2007, Chicago, IL
FINAL REPORT
The symposium entitled Structure and Dynamics at the Liquid-Liquid Interface was sponsored by the Division of Physical Chemistry at the 233rd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. Organized by Professors Mark Schlossman (Physics, University of Illinois, Chicago) and Rob Walker (Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Maryland, College Park), the symposium spanned all 5 days of the meeting with 8 sessions and 43 oral presentations (30 invited, 13 contributed). The symposium was broad both in scope and in international participation. Specific session topics ranged from the fundamental (structure and reactivity) to the applied (nanoparticles in a variety of applications and surfactants and their role in stabilizing emulsions), and the speakers represented 8 different countries.
Attendance was high throughout the symposium peaking during the Sunday PM and Monday AM sessions with ~110 in the audience. Even during the last session on the last day, however, ~45 people were present to listen to the four talks. Informal feedback from both participants and attendees has been uniformly positive, with the quality of talks and the general collegiality of the sessions being cited as specific highlights.
Due to the tepid response from participants regarding monograph opportunities, the organizers have chosen not to use this program as the basis for a book in the ACS Symposium Series.
The ACS-PRF provided $3600 to help defray the costs for several of the international speakers coming to this meeting. This sum was disbursed in the following way: $600 for Professor Michael Urbakh (Tel Aviv University, Israel; Electrowetting with Electrolytes); $1200 for Professor Kamil Wojciechowski (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland; Dynamic adsorption of the azacrown ethers at the liquid-liquid interface); $600 for Professor Bernard Binks (University of Hull, England; Effects of pH and salt concentration on oil in water emulsions stabilized solely by nanocomposite microgel particles); and $1200 for Professor Ali Zarbakhsh (Queen Mary College, England; Effect of counter ion size and charge on the structure of amphiphiles adsorbed at a liquid-liquid interface using neutron reflectometry). All speakers acknowledged in their presentations support from the ACS-PRF.
The organizers are very grateful to the ACS-PRF for its support of this symposium. The symposium itself was a striking success by any objective criterion. Hopefully, this symposium like its related predecessor, Faraday Discussions 129, will catalyze new collaborations and interactions between participants. At the very least, the presentations made in the recently completed symposium raised everyone's awareness about how different experimental and computational methodologies can converge to address specific questions about these complex systems.
