In the opening address, it was mentioned that the meeting was initially planned to be held in Amsterdam, but, considering the ‘many potential distractions’, it was moved to Maastricht…

During the first session, Prof. S. Stupp mentioned how delighted he was of being ’surrounded by people who think supramolecular chemistry is interesting’, and Prof. E. Yashima showed us how to still manage a talk when a computer crashes right before. Then, Prof. M. Eddaoudi gave us an nice introdution on Molecular Organic Frameworks (also known as ‘MOFs’, a word to remember since it’ll came roughly every second talk of the conference) and MOMs (Molecular Organic Materials, a new acronym to me).

At the end of the session came the Izatt-Christensen Award ceremony, delivered to Prof. Omar Yaghi from UCLA. In his introduction, J. Fraser Stoddart mentioned that Yaghi and his work had been coined as “sucker for carbon dioxide” in the Los Angeles Time (the article can be read here)… After a series of congratulations came the lecture, a truly amazing presentation on MOFs, COFs and ZIFs, of which several thousands have been synthesised and characterised over last years (I definitely have to spend a post on Yaghi’s work sooner or later). Furthermore, many of these compounds were shown to be able of storing important gases such as CO₂ or methane. Explaining why it is so important to build complex artificial materials, Yaghi said beautifully that one ‘cannot build aeroplanes from proteins’.

After that, the opening buffet (not to mention a short walk on the empty town – sunday evening) concluded a very promising first day, and I’ll tell more about this conference in following posts – as well as how we ended up discussing the chirality of snails at a pizzeria table!