55th EHPRG Chair's acknowledgements
Dear Participants of 55th EHPRG Meeting,
Hi Pressure Friends!
I hope that you safely arrived back home - I do appreciate all your efforts for organizing the trips and your scientific presentations.Thank again for coming to Poznań and for your invaluable contribution to this Meeting and to the progress in high-pressure research. Personally I learnt a lot from these lectures and posters I could attend, and I regret for not being able to attend all sessions.
I want to stress again that this 55th EHPRG Meeting could not happen without your contributions, as well as the initiative from the EHPRG executive members, and particularly Stefan Klotz and Konstantin Kamenev (previous and present EHPRG chairs), and without the active involvement from Organizing Committee here in Poznań, strongly supported by the Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry, Prof. Henryk Koroniak.
Prof. Koroniak not only shared his experience in organizing conferences, but also generously opened all premises of the new Collegium Chemicum building to the Meeting and asked lots of its personnel to help.
Most of organization tasks were shared between the Local Organizing Committee and the Adam Mickiewicz University Foundation, by its delegated group lead by Mr. Antoni Guliński.
The Local Organizing committee was co-chaired by Prof. Paweł Piszora, assisted by Drs Jolanta Darul, Anna Olejniczak, Małgorzata Ratajczak-Sitarz, Marcin Podsiadło and Mrs Hanna Piotrowicz; and also helped by other members of our Materials Chemistry Department: Dr Michalina Anioła, Dr Michał Andrzejewski (now in the Bern University), PhD students Karolina Kwaśna, Kinga Roszak, Aleksandra Półrolniczak, Szymon Sobczak, Kacper Rajewski and graduate students Ida Buchalska and Karolina Fercz. Some of those involved were completely invisible to you during the Meeting. I want to particularly acknowledge the invaluable help from Paweł Piszora, Jolanta Darul, Hanna Piotrowicz and Małgorzata Ratajczak-Sitarz who stayed till late hours during the final days of arranging the program - and particularly Paweł's help in dealing with troublesome and difficult organization matters. Paweł, Hanna Piotrowicz, Anna Olejniczak and Jolanta Darul resolved many current problems during the Meeting. Karolina Kwaśna, who turned her ankle the very first lecture, is much better now and we are very grateful for her help and sorry for the pain she suffered. I am grateful to Prof. Mirosław Makohonienko of the Faculty of Geography for preparing, presenting the lecture and guiding the Morasko Meteorite tour as well as Prof. Andrzej Muszyński of the Institute of Geology for his support (and for discovering the meteorite in the first place!). I am grateful to Mr. Piotr Szafarkiewicz of the University Sports Department for a favorable approach to the idea of making sport facilities available to participants in the conference.
I am grateful for the support from my wife, Anna, who tolerated my numerous late returns that I explained by the organization matters.
I am very to all sponsors, including the Ministry of Higher Education and the President of Poznań, Jacek Jaśkowiak and his representative, Ms. Joanna Jancz.
Most important, scientific part, was initiated by the International Advisory Board, and the EHPRG Committee members - about 1/3 of them responded actively and suggested the subjects of sessions, their chair-persons and plenary speakers. I followed these suggestions by sending off the invitations, and asking the chairs to set the program of their sessions. This process was the most difficult for me, because of the fierce 'competition' of very close in time congresses AIRAPT in Beijing and IUCr in Hyderabad. So, although some of the sessions were set quickly (the first one was finalized by Kamil Dziubek and Mercedes Taravillo Corralo, the second one by Francesca Fabbiani and Clivia Heiny), in some cases we had an ordeal of declines. For example, I counted 10 such declines when inviting lecturers to one of sessions - some sessions we composed of invited orals and orals. This was one of reasons for resigning from any restrictions regarding the duration of session presentations; I also had very different requests from sessions chairs (for example for a 30, 40, 45 and 60 min lecture; and 10, 15 and 20 min for the oral).
I would also like to comment on two other issues related to the Meeting:
1. I had a wild idea to invite or to encourage at least representatives of all countries in Europe to attend this meeting, so I started contacting those absent in then up-to-date list of registered participants. I quickly learnt that that was impossible - for example I wrote to 4 high-pressure senior researchers in one of European countries, and they either excused themselves for some reasons, pointed to their senior colleagues and one did not respond at all to the repeated mails; they could not delegate students, either. So after some more attempts I gave up the idea. Nonetheless representatives of 26 countries attended the Meeting, which is not bad at all!
2. The active recreation during the Meeting in our Sports Department was either welcome - some people were delighted while others not interested - often because of the lack of time in the packed program. Unfortunately, at present we have no cricket, rugby nor golf, very popular in the Southern hemisphere.
Thanks a lot again to all of you, these mentioned and all those not mentioned by name above! I do apologize for not addressing all those who contributed to the Meeting - many 'silent' helpers.
Below please find enclosed some final statistics of the 55th EHPRG Meeting.
Best regards,
Andrzej Katrusiak
55th EHPRG Meeting in Poznań - Statistical Numbers:
Participants 220………..women 54
………..man . 166
Students 44
………..women 14
………..men 31
Sessions 27
Open lecture 1
Plenary lectures 5
Session lectures 30
Oral communications 62
Posters 93
Countries represented 26
