SIWAN history

Our very own conference, the 5th Szeged International Conference on Advances in Nanoscience (SIWAN 2012) will be next week from Wednesday 'til Saturday. The basic info is in the University news and the conference homepage.

I'll keep the blog updated with SIWAN2012 news throughout next week of course. However, right now let me recite the history of the SIWAN series for you!

Back in Spring 2003 I was freshly home after doing almost 2 years of postdoc research on carbon nanotubes in the lab of Hans Kuzmany at the University of Vienna, Austria. Zoltán Kónya arrived home after spending a year with Gabor A. Somorjai at Berkeley, USA and our boss, the late Imre Kiricsi was highly motivated to do top nanotechnology research with us. A small workshop seemed like a good idea to put the group more firmly onto the European nanotechnology map. Funds were raised, a simple logo was designed, the workshop title and the acronym were coined and invitations were sent to some excellent European researchers who were also our friends from concluded and running EC FP projects. I was very pleasantly surprised when so many of them accepted – thank you again!

The original SIWAN logo. This logo, the conference title and the SIWAN acronym are all my brainchildren.

SIWAN 2003 was a success because it managed to get top international researchers and motivated Szeged students together. It was free for all participants because we covered all costs. The scientific program consisted of 15 talks and 16 posters.

SIWAN 2004 was a direct successor built on the same model. The main difference was that we rounded up some Hungarian state funding from a "Mecenatúra" grant and therefore, we were able to allow more participants to attend the workshop. 25 talks and 16 posters were presented and the event was generally considered to be a success.

In 2005 and 2006 we were unsure about the long-term positioning of SIWAN. More and more Hungarian groups joined international projects, traditional conferences (e.g. those that were originally focused on colloidal systems) have shifted their attention towards nano science etc. and therefore, the need for yet another event was not so pushing anymore. Moreover, our proposals requesting funding specifically for SIWAN were rejected and therefore, these years have passed without a workshop.

The third SIWAN was organized in 2007 as a dedicated dissemination event of our EC FP6 project "SANES". With 11 talks, no posters and a length of a single day this event was more like a workshop and less like a conference. Frankly, SIWAN 2007 was functional and the level of science was high, but the event itself was not much to talk about later.

SIWAN as a conference was revived in 2008 with the very important help of Prof. Katalin Kamarás who was working at MTA SZFKI at that time. She secured some significant co-financing for the meeting that allowed us to have 20 talks and 19 posters again. Even more important was the fact that because of the increased attention of the Hungarian colleagues, SIWAN 2008 looked and felt like a real conference instead of a project workshop. The feedback from the participants was all positive and thus we regained our enthusiasm for SIWAN. It was during the poster session discussion of SIWAN 2008 that the idea of transforming the series into a regular, biannual conference with open international attendance and a registration fee first popped up.

Although we did make some preparations in 2009 for the next meeting, the shocking illness and passing of Imre Kiricsi in 2010 ruled out the possibility of SIWAN 2010 completely. Those were sad and difficult times indeed.

It is dubious if we would have the present SIWAN if it was not for Balázs Réffy and Erna Sári of Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary. They proposed transforming the workshop into a conference in 2010 and were willing to assist us in all related technical issues from building a homepage to handling payments and contracting services. Their offer was accepted in 2011 after much pondering about the justification of transforming a free event into a paid conference. Looking back now, it was a good decision because it allowed us to concentrate on the scientific part, which appears to have made a huge difference. At SIWAN 2012 we will have 7 keynote lectures, 59 contributed talks and over 100 posters from over 30 countries. More than 150 participants are registered and the total number of attendees when taking interested Szeged students into account will likely be over 200. 
Only three more days to go until the biggest SIWAN event so far, let us all hope that it will be a successful one!