First International School on Advanced Porous Materials

The First International School on Advanced Porous Materials (MOFSchool2019), which took place from 17 to 21 June 2019 at Villa del Grumello, Como, Italy, as part of the events patronized by the Lake Como School on Advanced Studies, was attended by 78 participants - 54 students, 10 teachers, the representatives of 2 commercial sponsors and the Organizing Committee members. The cultural and scientific exchange certainly benefited from the presence of a vast number of foreign attendees, coming from up to 21 different countries of the 5 continents. The school, dedicated to an audience of young students, neophytes to the chemistry of porous metallorganic materials, focused on the synthesis and characterization of these materials, as well as on a number of representative applications (e.g. CO₂ capture, water capture, volatile organic compounds capture and separation). To this aim, several front lectures and one hands-on session were organized. In more detail, the school covered the following topics:

• Synthesis and post-synthesis methods; reticular chemistry; selective capture of greenhouse gases or water from air (Omar Yaghi). Professor Yaghi also gave an informal evening lecture on personal anecdotes connected with the scientific discoveries realized in his laboratories over the past 20 years.
• Advanced characterization methods: spectroscopies (Silvia Bordiga); single-crystal X-ray diffraction (Felipe Gándara); powder in situ X-ray diffraction (Valentina Colombo); X-ray absorption (Kirill Lomachenko).
• Topological description and hands-on session with the software TOPOS (Davide Proserpio and Vladislav Blatov).
• Structural flexibility and defects introduction (Roland Fischer).
• Role of unsaturated metals as active sites and their characterization; use of structural flexibility for the capture/release of industrially relevant gases and the cooperative adsorption of CO₂ and other strategic gases (Jeffrey Long).
• Integration of porous materials within circuits for applications in electronics (Rob Ameloot).

The young participants were given the opportunity to present their research during one flash-presentation session and two poster-presentation sessions. Six prizes were offered for the best poster and flash presentations by the IUCr, Berkeley Global Science Institute, Chemical Society Reviews and CrystEngComm and awarded to six young participants.

The school benefited from a number of different financial contributions. The IUCr fund supported the accommodation or travel expenses of three students, namely Avena Maia Renata (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Jung Minji (Gyeongnam National University of Science and Technology, Korea) and Rajak Richa (Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India).