Joint RQ 17 & ISMANAM 27 Conference took place at WUT

RQ conferences are triennial meetings, and ISMANAM is held every year, both events are organised by scientific institutions around the world. Year 2020 was a special one to both communities, because this was the 60^th anniversary of publishing the paper about the first ever metallic glass. In 2020, there was another round anniversary: 50 years from the first scientific conference about metallic glasses and other metastable materials, later called “RQ 1”. In order to celebrate both anniversaries by entire community of researchers involved in the studies of amorphous and other metastable materials, it was decided that uniquely in 2020, RQ and ISMANAM conferences would be organised together. Due to the pandemic and the hostilities in neighbouring Ukraine, the conference had to be postponed to August 2023.

The Joint RQ 17 & ISMANAM 27 conference gathered 190 participants from 25 countries, mainly from China, Germany, Korea, Austria and Switzerland. The programme provided 14 plenary and 29 invited lectures, 74 oral presentations and 45 posters presented at the poster session on 21 August. Additionally, 5 companies participated as exhibitors during the event. In particular, lectures were given by Professor Akihisa Inoue the pioneer in the development of Bulk Metallic Glasses and Advanced Non-Equilibrium Materials. He was serving as a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and the President of Tohoku University. Professor Inoue has authored more than 2800 publications, and was identified as No. 1 in worldwide ranking of highly cited authors publishing in materials science and engineering journals during 1996-2006. Another distinguished speaker was Professor Brian Cantor, Professor of Materials at Oxford and Brunel Universities. He invented the field of Multicomponent High Entropy Alloys and discovered “Cantor alloys”. In the recent past, he has been Vice-Chancellor of the Universities of Bradford and York, Head of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Oxford, a research scientist at GE Labs in the USA, a consultant for Alcan, NASA and Rolls-Royce, editor of Progress in Materials Science and a Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering. It is noteworthy that the special guest of this jubilee meeting was the co-organiser of the first RQ conference in 1970, Professor Emil Babić.

RQ International Advisory Committee selected 3 scientists for the RQ Distinguished Fellow Award: Prof. Kamanio Chattopadhyay (India), Prof. Akihisa Inoue (Japan) and Prof. William L. Johnson (USA). This award recognizes highly distinguished career-long contributions. ISMANAM Steering Committee awarded Dr. Nicoleta Lupu (Romania) with Alain Reza Yavari Senior Scientist Award, as well as Dr. Indranil Basu (Switzerland) and Prof. Jun Ding (China) with the Early-Career Scientist Awards. Additionally, on 22 August the historical session took place to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of the discovery of metallic glass and the 50^th anniversary of the RQ conference.

The joined event was organised by the Team of Amorphous and Nanocrystalline Materials (Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering, WUT) founded in 1973 by the late Prof. Henryk Matyja. This year is the 100^th anniversary of his birth and 50^th anniversary of the founding of the Team. The conference sponsors were: Warsaw University of Technology and Polish Academy of Sciences. We are honoured that this special scientific event took place at Warsaw University of Technology.

For more information on the conference, please visit www.rq2023.pl.