International Symposium & School on Crystal Growth Fundamentals

Aim of Symposium and School

It is our great pleasure to invite you to the International Symposium & School on "New Insights into Crystal Growth Fundamentals: A tribute to Profs. Ichiro Sunagawa and Pieter Bennema.” This symposium/school will be held at Akiu, Sendai, Japan on 3-7 November 2018.

The symposium/school was initially planned for the memory of Professors Ichiro Sunagawa and Pieter Bennema, who had remarkably contributed to the understanding of crystal growth mechanisms but passed away in recent years. Since, however, so many well-known scientists have agreed to contribute to this symposium from many countries, we then decided to open this symposium as an international school to students and young scientists who want to study crystal growth fundamentals.

The aim of this school is to bring together teachers who are experts in the rich range of phenomena associated with nucleation, growth and dissolution processes of crystals and minerals in various environments, and students who want to study fundamental crystal growth phenomena in variety of fields. The field covers not only fundamental crystal growth but also the application to industries, earth and space sciences, environmental sciences. We specially emphasize that this school is organized for those who want to learn and to understand crystal growth in a systematic way. In order to fulfill these aims, we ask lecturers to give us a tutorial lecture.

To have mutual, deep public discussions between students/young scientists and lecturers to advance education in crystal growth fundamentals, we request each poster presenter to report the content of discussions points and questions which they got during the poster session. This extensive open discussion will be held on the final day. Our young tutors will assist these poster presenters to prepare and summarize the discussion points for the open discussion.

Tohoku University will be able to award an official credit point to the graduate students of Tohoku University who present their posters and reports, at the end of symposium/School on the discussion points through the poster sessions. We also award the certificates to other students.

Brief history of Sunagawa and Benenma

A person’s scientific contributions should not be measured only by their achievements in research, but also by the influence they have had on their students and fellow scientists. We believe that these two threads of “research” and “human relations” are both necessary to weave the fabric of “science”. Here we can see the histories of both professors briefly so that how their scientific works had activated our sciences of crystal growth and human relations.

Unique Style of the Poster Session

To have mutual, deep public discussions between students/young scientists and lecturers to advance education in crystal growth fundamentals, we request each presenter to report the content of discussions points and questions which they got during the poster session. This extensive open discussion will be held on the final day.