Professor Masako Kato, Department of Applied Chemistry for Environment, School of Biological and Environmental Sciences, gave a Keynote Talk at the 26th Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr 2023) held in Melbourne, Australia from August 22 to 29, 2023.
This is the largest international conference on crystallography held once every three years, where researchers in various fields related to crystals gather from all over the world. The Melbourne International Convention and Exhibition Centre, the venue for this year's conference, was also busy with a variety of crystallography-related events for the public, attended not only by researchers from around the world but also by local junior and senior high school students.
As one of the keynote speakers in the field of structural chemistry, Prof. Kato gave a talk entitled "Chromic soft crystals based on photofunctional metal complexes" including her latest research results on soft crystals, in which she demonstrated platinum complexes exhibited red-blue luminescence by aligning them in highly ordered arrangements in crystals and remarkable color changes in response to weak stimuli. This talk attracted the interest of many researchers, including some questions from young researchers. It was an excellent opportunity to showcase the research activity in this field in Japan to researchers from around the world.