Traditionally, over the last 45 years crystal chemists have gathered at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv in late September in order to participate in the International Conference on Crystal Chemistry of Intermetallic Compounds organized by the researchers of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry, who represent the Lviv crystal chemistry school.
Rector Volodymyr Melnyk and Chairperson of the Organizing Committee, Vice-Rector for Research Roman Gladyshevskii took part in the opening ceremony of the 13th International Conference on Crystal Chemistry of Intermetallic Compounds held in the Assembly Hall of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv on 26 September.
The Rector and Vice-Rector welcomed the participants of one of the major scientific events for crystal chemists in Ukraine and wished them fruitful debates, productive work, interesting discussions of key issues in the field of inorganic chemistry and crystal chemistry and good impressions of staying in Lviv and Lviv University .
Thus, on four successive days leading Ukrainian scholars as well as scientists from twenty countries will be discussing topical issues of modern crystal chemistry and will be presenting new findings on the synthesis, crystal structure and properties of intermetallic and related compounds in their reports, poster presentations and presentation materials. The participants also intend to exchange scientific information and to encourage and expand international cooperation.
Twenty world renowned scientists in the field of crystal chemistry are among the speakers invited to the conference, namely Ernst Bauer, Vienna University of Technology (Austria), Rached Ben Hassen, University of Tunis El Manar (Tunisia), Daniel Fruchart and Nataliya Skryabina, Institut Néel (Grenoble, France), Itzhak Halevy, Nuclear Research Center Negev (Beersheba, Israel), Ladislav Havela, Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic), Bogdan Idzikowski, Institute of Molecular Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Poznan, Poland), Jean-Marc Joubert, East Paris Institute of Chemistry and Materials Science (Thiais, France), Dariusz Kaczorowski, Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Wroclaw, Poland), Holger Kohlmann, Leipzig University (Germany), Susan Latturner, Florida State University (USA), Arthur Mar, University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada), Mathieu Pasturel, University of Rennes 1 (France), Vitalij Pecharsky, Iowa State University (Ames, USA), Václav Petříček, Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague, Czech Republic), Klaus Richter, Vienna University (Austria), Andrzej Szytuła, Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland), Pierre Villars, Materials Phases Data System (Vitznau, Switzerland), Peter Zavalij, University of Maryland (College Park, USA) and Igor Barchiy, Uzhhorod National University.
According to the organizers, every year the International Conference on Crystal Chemistry of Intermetallic Compounds is increasingly attracting attention, and therefore the forum is becoming more and more popular among academic schools around the world, which enables the researchers of the Lviv crystal chemistry school to demonstrate their achievements to the international scholarly community, as well as expand the geographic scope of the Conference, in which the researchers from different continents are willing to participate.
It should be noted that over the past 25 years the representatives of the Lviv crystal chemistry school have synthesized and identified the crystal structure of more than 2,000 new intermetallic compounds, have discovered and described almost 200 structural types. They studied physical and chemical properties, established composition, structure and properties for the majority of the compounds, which became the scientific basis for creating technically important materials.
Crystal chemists of Lviv University actively collaborate with well-known research centres, namely Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Wroclaw, Poland), Vienna University (Austria), University of Genoa (Italy), University of Münster (Germany), Darmstadt University of Technology (Germany), Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (Dresden, Germany), University of Rennes (France), Institut Néel (Grenoble, France), University of Geneva (Switzerland).
Every year, the researchers of the Lviv crystal chemistry school publish over 100 academic articles, in particular in leading professional journals with high impact factor, and their papers are appreciated by foreign partners, which generates interest in the Conference.