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Attendance at IUPAC Macro 2006, World Polymer Congress, Rio, Brazil, July 16-20 2006

In the depths of Melbourne’s winter, I travelled via Santiago, Chile to sunny Rio, Brazil to attend the IUPAC Macro 2006, World Polymer Congress, which is one of the major international polymer meetings held every two years. The trip started off well with a chance to try some local seafood in Santiago including king crab from Patagonia and raw sea urchin (15 cm across) - the latter, I have decided is an acquired taste. On arrival in Rio the next day, I was surprised at the landscape - everyone is familiar with the Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) statue located in the Corcovado Mountain but Rio is surrounded by a number of small mountains. The other famous attributes of Rio are, of course, the beaches and fortunately the conference was being held adjacent to the beautiful Barra da Tijuca Beach which looks out onto the South Atlantic Ocean.

Apart from presenting at the conference, I was also attending the meeting because it was being held just after the first board meeting of the journal, Polymer International, of which I am an associate editor. This meeting was very interesting because it allowed us to clearly discuss, face-to-face, which direction we wanted the journal to go and the strategies to achieve this aim.

The IUPAC Macro 2006 meeting opened with a Plenary lecture by ex-New Zealander Alan MacDiarmid who co-discovered conductive polymers in the 1980s. His talk “New Materials For The 21st Century: Electronic Polymers and Nanoscience” was as stimulating as are all of his presentations. This was followed by a Plenary on “New opportunities for polymers at the interface of photonics, nanotechnology and biotechnology” by Paras Prasad. With over 1000 attendees, the main conference lectures were split between 13 sessions each day, usually commencing with Plenary talks. My lecture on “Photo-polymerization of a divinyl ether with photo-bleaching/non-bleaching sensitized iodonium systems” (co-authored by my research student, Shaohua Chen, and my research fellow, Fei Chen), was presented on Monday afternoon and was well received. The rest of the five day conference proceeded very well as expected of the quality of speakers present. The next World Polymer Conference will be held in 2008 in Taipei, Taiwan and if you want to attend an excellent polymer conference, I recommend that you think of attending this meeting.

Wayne Cook