During the first week of September, many within the polymer crystallization community converged on Genoa, Italy for a 3-day workshop hosted by Dario Cavallo, Giancarlo Alfonso and Gerrit Peters. For me, this was a great event. Several “old” friends in the field were there (Maria Di Lorenzo, Daniela Mileva) and several great scientists that I have certainly read but never had the pleasure to meet were in attendance. Bernard Lotz lead a great lecture, and I’m glad to have seen him speak. Zhe Ma, an author that helped to set the stage for much of our flow induced crystallization work, was there and we had some great discussions. Müller, Pan, Saalwaechter and many others contributed to rich discussion, and I’m glad our group could be a part of this meeting. Thanks to funding from the NSF and from SKF Corporation, Anne Gohn and Jiho Seo, both graduate students, were also able to attend and experience what it’s like to argue the boundaries of what’s known in a field of science.

Here you can see the beautiful Genoa harbor:

And here is our graduate student Jiho Seo, explaining the finer points of PEEK crystallization: