The Fourth Asia-Pacific Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry

The 2010 Fourth Asia-Pacific Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry (2010 APWC) was held at Wangjiang Hotel in Chengdu, Sichuan, China, from November 26th to 30th. We were indeed honoured to have the opportunity to welcome over 200 participants from 14 countries and regions. The conference provided analytical spectrochemists worldwide with a forum for in-depth academic discussion, an opportunity for meeting with old friends and making new ones, as well as a true Chinese cultural experience.

The Wangjiang Hotel during the conference.

During the conference, 62 oral lectures were presented, including 5 plenary, 26 keynote, 14 invited and 17 contributed lectures. The five plenary lectures were “Novel Mass Spectrometers for Plasma Spectrochemistry” by Gary M. Hieftje, “ICP-MS and Nuclear Hybrid Techniques for Nanotoxicology” by Zhifang Chai, “Biological Application of ICP-MS with Single-Particle Mode” by Xinrong Zhang, “ICP-MS Detection in Chromatography and Electrophoresis: the Electrospray MS Challenge” by Ryszard Lobinski, and “ICP-MS: a New Tool for Proteomics” by Norbert Jakubowski. Other oral presentations covered fundamental developments, new and improved instrumentation, laser spectroscopy, spectroscopic diagnostics, and analytical applications of spectroscopy across all disciplines. In addition, 62 posters were presented, together with an instrument exhibition.

For the first lecture of this conference, Professor Ramon M. Barnes introduced the 30-year-long history of the Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry, with many photographs, both new and old. Professor Benli Huang and Professor Zheming Ni were presented with the “Lifetime Achievement Award for Analytical Atomic Spectrometry in China”, in recognition of their lifetime of outstanding contributions to analytical atomic spectrometry, and ten posters first-authored by graduate students were selected for the Shimadzu Best Poster Award.

Award presentation. From left: Xiandeng (Dan) Hou, Ramon Barnes, Benli Huang, Pengyuan Yang (on behalf of Zheming Ni), Gary Hieftje, and Guibin Jiang.

We are happy to see a selection of the papers presented at this conference published in this themed issue of JAAS. We also appreciate the financial support mainly from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Thermo Fisher, Shimadzu, Perkin Elmer, and Agilent, and the great support from student volunteers and our colleagues.

Sichuan opera: Face change act during one of the three sponsored banquets which were hosted by Thermo Fisher Scientific, Shimadzu, and Perkin Elmer.

The 2012 Fifth Asia-Pacific Winter Conference will be held in Cheju Island, Korea, and will be chaired by Professor Heung Bin Lim. I hope we can all meet there again for another successful Asia-Pacific Winter Conference.

During one of the evening banquets.

Agilent Tour Day: Giant pandas from France, Germany and China.

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