The 19th European Symposium on Fluorine Chemistry (19th ESFC)

The 19th European Symposium on Fluorine Chemistry (19th ESFC) was held on 25-31 August 2019. We met on the premises of the Faculty of Physics UW and the Centre for New Technologies UW at the Ochota Campus in Warsaw. 

The symposium was chaired by Prof. Wojciech Grochala from the Centre of New Technologies University of Warsaw, while Prof. Henryk Koroniak from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań served as Honorary Chairman. The Biological and Chemical Research Centre UW (CNBCh UW) with its Director, Prof. Ewa Bulska, and the Faculty of Chemistry UW led by the dean, Prof. Andrzej Kudelski, were also involved in the organization of the event.

The program of the symposium was created by a team of world’s best specialists in the field of organic, inorganic and materials fluorine chemistry. The conference was attended by about 300 scientists from all over the world, from Europe as well as from China, Japan, Korea, Canada, the United States and many other countries. We were honoured to host a Nobel Prize Laureate in chemistry (1981), Professor Roald Hoffmann, who gave inspiring lecture on inverting ligand fields and group theory. Other distinguished plenary speakers of the symposium included professors Stephen Blundell, Karl Christe, Istvan Horvath, Ingo Krossing, Yanming Ma, Pierangelo Metrangolo, David O’Hagan, and Corey Stephenson. Their presentations were acclaimed by the participants.

Mikołaj Kopernik, Maria Skłodowska-Curie and Fryderyk Chopin were patrons of this year’s Symposium on Fluorine Chemistry. The conference participants had the opportunity to visit places connected with the lives of the symposium’s patrons in Warsaw, Toruń and Żelazowa Wola. 

The next edition of the symposium will be held in August 2022 in Berlin.

For more information about this year’s symposium visit: https://f2019.uw.edu.pl/

The University of Warsaw's choir