The 2013 Gordon Research Conference schedule is available now. Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., will host the ceramics Gordon Research Conference—but it will not take place until 2014. Credit: Mt. Holyoke College; Facebook.

The February 15 issue of Science includes a catalog (pdf) of the 2013 Gordon Research Conferences, with short descriptions of each conference, plus dates, locations, and organizers. (See the GRC website for full details about all the conferences.) A fair number of GRCs offer Gordon Research Seminars, too, which are two-day meetings specifically for graduate students, post-doctoral associates, and young researchers and precede the regular conference.

The next installment of the long-running “Solid State Studies in Ceramics” will be in 2014. The ceramics GRC dates back to 1954 and was held yearly through 2008. At that time, it switched to an every-other-year schedule. However, it is not too soon to be thinking about it, and interested attendees are encouraged to contact organizers early. One hallmark of the GRC is that it is by invitation (based on an application) and limited to only about 150 participants.

According to the GRC website, they were founded “to promote discussions and the free exchange of ideas at the research frontiers.” Martha Mecartney, organizer of the 2012 GRC, says, “Everyone attends the same session, stays on site, eats together in the cafeterias. There is also much time for discussion—for example, after a 40 minute invited talk, there would be 20 minutes of discussion, and much more informal discussion later in the evenings and in the late afternoons.”

The ACerS Basic Science Division traditionally supports the ceramics GRC. Last year, for example, BSD helped fund the attendance of graduate students and a reception for them.

Although you will have to wait a year for “our” GRC, I found a few that seem to intersect with the ceramics community’s interests.

  • Clusters, Nanocrystals and Nanostructures—”From Fundamental Chemical and Physical Processes to Application”
  • Electron Distribution and Chemical Bonding—”Pushing the Limits of Experimental and Theoretical Charge and Spin Density Studies”
  • High Temperature Corrosion—”Solution for Energy Issues and Future Role in High Temperature Processes”
  • Nano-mechanical Interfaces—”Multiphysics Theory and Experiments”
  • Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory

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