Fifth Belgian Crystallography Symposium

Brussels, Belgium, October 2008

More than 85 scientists took part in the Fifth Belgian Crystallography Symposium BCS-5, held under the auspices of the Belgian National Committee for Crystallography. Due to the success of previous BCS meetings, the National Committee for Crystallography organizes this symposium at biennial intervals to promote interdisciplinary contacts between Belgian scientists who use diffraction and microscopy techniques for atomic scale studies in the apparently unrelated fields of condensed matter chemistry and physics, material sciences, earth sciences and life sciences. As one of the main objectives was to promote personal contacts, plenary lectures were limited to three and given by distinguished colleagues in widely different fields: 'Cracking lobster shell protein structures' by John Helliwell (Manchester, UK), '2D crystal engineering: from patterns to function' by Steven De Feyter (Leuven, Belgium) and 'Crystallographic excursion in superspace' by Gervais Chapuis (Lausanne, Switzerland). A poster session and commercial exhibition was organized during lunchtime. For the afternoon session three oral presentations were selected from the submitted abstracts (J. L. Ferrer, Grenoble, France; H. D'Hondt, Antwerp, Belgium; P. Nockemann, Leuven). At the end of the meeting two poster prizes were awarded to S. Cabus and F. Robert. This BCS-5 meeting was sponsored by the Royal Academies of Sciences and Art of Belgium, and by the firms Bruker AXS, Oxford Diffraction, Isogen Life Science, Goffin Meyvis, FEI Europe and JEOL.

Luc Van Meervelt