Summer School Success

Meeting Report: ICIQ Summer School, Tarragona, Spain

Organized by the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia with support from Real Sociedad Española de Química (RSEQ), the summer school once more proved successful, as described by Summer School Director, Antonio M. Echavarren:

Last week (July 19 – 23), we had more than 100 young participants attend the ICIQ Summer School. The summer school acts as a forum for the discussion of the hottest areas of research in chemistry and has been held at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), Tarragona, Spain, since 2006, just a year after its inauguration.

On this occasion, we had a broad rage of topics covered by international leaders in:

total synthesis (Erik J. Sorensen from Princeton University and Dirk Trauner from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München),
synthetic methods (Cristina Nevado from the University of Zurich, Tobias Ritter from the University of Harvard, and Veronique Gouverneur from the University of Oxford),
catalysts design (Amir Hoveyda, Boston College),
organocatalysis (Helma Wennemers from the University of Basel and Benjamin List from the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung), and
molecular machines (David Leigh, University of Edinburgh).

This year’s school was a success, not only because of the extraordinary level of all the lectures, but also because of the active discussions between the speakers and the graduate students and postdocts that came from all over Spain and other European countries.

Left: A postdoc from the ICIQ (Dr. Vincent Coeffard) asks a question of Prof. Helma Wennemers (Basel) after her second lecture on Tuesday 20th. In the front row (black shirt) is Benjamin List. Prof. Antonio M. Echavarren is in the first row at the back (blue shirt). Right: Prof. Tobias Ritter (Harvard) during his second lecture on Thursday 22nd.

Right: The lectures continued on Thursday 22nd, with Veronique Gouverneur (Oxford) giving her first lecture of the session. Left: Prof. Cristina Nevado (Zürich) after her first lecture.