First International Conference on "Crystal Engineering: From Molecule to Crystal"

The First International Conference on "Crystal Engineering: From Molecule to Crystal" (CE:FMC2019) was held from 30 to 31 March 2019 in Raipur. Raipur is the capital city of Chhattisgarh state in central India. The conference was organized by the Department of Chemistry at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Raipur, and was attended by 70 participants from India and neighboring countries. The two-day format included two Plenary lectures (1 hour each), four Keynote lectures (40 minutes each) and nine invited talks (30 minutes each). In addition, there were 10 oral (20 minutes each) and 20 flash oral (2 minutes each) contributions selected by the Scientific Committee from the submitted abstracts. The poster session enabled about 25 participants to share their work in this exciting meeting for the crystal engineering community.

The Indian Crystallographic Association (ICA) supported the conference by providing a fund of INR 25,000 for conference expenditure and two best poster and two best flash oral awards. The Science and Engineering Research Board, Department of Science and Technology (SERB-DST), India, supported the conference by providing a fund of INR 125,000 for travel/accommodation of Senior and Young Scientists and pre-conference printing. The invitation to attend the conference as Plenary lecturers was kindly accepted by Gautam R. Desiraju (IUCr Past President) and Edward R. T. Tiekink (Sunway University, Malaysia). The CE:FMC2019 also had the pleasure of hosting four other eminent scientists as Keynote speakers, Kumar Biradha (Associate Editor, Crystal Growth & Design; IIT Kharagpur, India), C. Malla Reddy (IISER Kolkata, India), Kittipong Chainok (Thammasat University, Thailand) and R. Vaidhyanathan (IISER Pune, India), and 10 young scientists as invited speakers.