46464-SE
29th International Symposium on Free Radicals, August 2007, Big Sky, MT,
The 29th International Symposium on Free Radicals was held August 12-17, 2007 at the Big Sky Resort in Big Sky, Montana. This meeting dates back to 1956, when it was first held in Quebec City, Canada. The initial motivation for the meeting was that detailed spectroscopic studies of free radicals in the gas-phase and under matrix-isolation conditions was becoming possible. Free radicals and other reactive species remain topics of great interest today owing to the central role they play as reactive intermediates. The field has expanded to increasingly focus on the dynamics of radical reactions in addition to spectroscopy and kinetics. However, as we seek to understand complex environments in combustion, atmospheric chemistry, condensed phase phenomena and the interstellar medium in great detail, all of these techniques continue to play critical roles. Thus, the meeting continues to address important topics in chemistry and is the premier biennial meeting on free radicals, with topics ranging from elegant spectroscopic studies of isolated species to the kinetics and reaction dynamics of free radicals relevant to combustion, atmospheric and interstellar processes. For the 29th International Symposium, a broad definition of free radicals, including paramagnetic molecules, ions, molecules in excited states, and other transient species was used in determining the lineup of invited speakers. The relevance of these applications to research relevant to the practical uses of petroleum products in combustion and environmental phenomena is self-evident and was one of the motivating factors in requesting support from the ACS-PRF Type SE grant program. While other support for the meeting was raised from registration fees, industrial and publishing concerns and federal agencies (AFOSR and DOE), the ACS-PRF Type SE support was particularly valuable in that it was the primary source for travel funds for some of our distinguished international speakers. In particular, the funds were used to support five international speakers, including Juergen Troe and Martina Havenith from Germany, Brian Howard and Andrew Orr-Ewing from the United Kingdom and Xueming Yang from China. International participation in this meeting is a tradition and extremely important, so promoting participation by international speakers was an important part of making the meeting a great success. In the end we had over 125 researchers, ranging from undergraduates to senior professors and researchers in government laboratories, and by all accounts everyone enjoyed the meeting and found it to be a stimulating opportunity to stay on the frontier of free-radical research. 1
