It has been several months since I last posted. With a busy summer, entertaining kids when there is no school and other distractions, I have omitted to sit down and type about things. No matter.

Earlier this week I went to the Euromat Conference in Glasgow. This is organised by the federation of European Materials Societies and is one of those multiple parallel session occasions with the interesting talks distributed 100s of metres apart so you cannot easily flit between rooms to hear them. In many ways these inconveniences do not matter because the real reason to come to scientific meetings is to meet people and talk about your work. And you never know who you might meet.

At the conference dinner (in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery – one of those 19th Century monuments to municipal civic pride that grace British Cities) I was talking to an amiable senior American academic about some recent work in my group, when he said “Yes I wrote a paper on that in 1980”.
“Oh you’re that Davis”, I blurted out.
We then had an interesting chat and I promised (still not done it though) to send him a copy of a recent paper I wrote with a student of mine and also to send him an important paper he had missed that had been published 5 years ago by a Dutch group.

I had had my arm twisted to organise a session on printing materials and devices. It is always difficult to persuade people to come to a session in a meeting that is frankly not in the Premier League but it was heartening to find the room fairly full for the talks. There had been rumours going round that some sessions had audiences in single figures.

European meetings do not seem to have the buzz of the larger or similar size US organised ones (at least in Materials Science). This is partly because European meetings cycle round different countries and tend to lack any continuity of organisation. In addition, US meetings seem to serve a community gathering function with academics almost feeling obliged to attend to confirm their existence. In which case the meetings can act as a snapshot of what is going on. Again European meetings do not serve this purpose, although arguably that is where they could be most effective in fostering communication/collaboration across national boundaries.