In July 2025, I was invited to present a keynote at the 27th IUPAC International Conference on Chemical Thermodynamics, ICCT 2025 in Porto, Portugal. Being organized by Research Center in Chemistry (CIQUP), where I spend my postdoc, the conference was a must. The conference organization was great, with some perfect ideas like organizing the poster session, the welcoming reception, and the farewell party in the university gardens. The conference dinner joint with optional excursion to the Port wine cellars of the Ferreira company was also a noticeable memory.
In July 2025, I was invited to present a keynote at the 27th IUPAC International Conference on Chemical Thermodynamics, ICCT 2025 in Porto, Portugal. Being organized by Research Center in Chemistry (CIQUP), where I spend my postdoc, the conference was a must. The conference organization was great, with some perfect ideas like organizing the poster session, the welcoming reception, and the farewell party in the university gardens. The conference dinner joint with optional excursion to the Port wine cellars of the Ferreira company was also a noticeable memory.
Topics of the conference were to my surprise dominantly oriented towards the topic of sustainability: carbon capture and utilization, hydrogen processes, dye recycling, and aqueous-based alternatives to organic solvents. On the other hand, new devices and more fundamental research was also presented like the effect of positional entropy or a plan for pH redefinition. Did you know, that if you ask a chatbot for definition of pH, it may answer incorrectly?
To another surprise (since the final program was only available shortly before the conference), the COST action was repeatedly mentioned during the conference. I presented a keynote titled “Path from experiment to standard: Development of reference data for sublimation properties,” which seemed to be received very positively by the participants. In short, I spoke about the need of accurate sublimation enthalpy values (including for benchmarking of crystal structure prediction methods), the scarcity of facilities that would focus on the topic and the common mistakes that degrade the attempts to develop reference sublimation enthalpy data. Except for my talk, prof. Manuel E. Minas da Piedade had another keynote related to the Action (“Turning a curse into an opportunity: How thermodynamics can help selecting the right organic crystal phase for a specific application”) and also the contributions of Carlos Bernardes and the Action PI prof. Ivo Rietveld could be attended.
Next ICCT will be in 2027 in Perth and the question of participating there will be definitely hard to decide for me.