Welcome to the 2018 ACS national meeting in Boston

There is no such thing as a bad location for an ACS national meeting. Regardless of where these events are hosted, they are popular with the chemical sciences community, always gathering 10,000-plus attendees from every corner of the globe. The secret sauce? ACS national meetings are jam packed with thousands of presentations at the cutting edge of science. They gather the best scientific brains on the planet and offer plenty of opportunities to network and establish collaborations and partnerships.

But if I were asked to rank the locations in terms of my personal preference, Boston would be at or near the top. One reason for this, I must admit, is completely whimsical: I like the sea. Having the opportunity early in the day before the presentations start or between events to go for a quick stroll near the ocean is simply a luxury and an excellent way of focusing the mind.

A less fanciful reason is that Boston is a global hub for science and gathers an incredible amount of creative and entrepreneurial talent within a few square kilometers. As such, the Boston meeting is one that, compared with other ACS national meetings, tends to attract a larger proportion of representatives from the industrial sector, which is a welcome feature.

By the time you read this editorial, the meeting will be well under way, exploring all aspects of this year’s theme—“Nanoscience, Nanotechnology & Beyond”—and facilitating discussion of how nanoscience is affecting health care, space exploration, and more. As always, there are so many activities to pick from that we decided to create a short list of must-attend events and must-see presenters.

C&EN has a lot going on at the meeting, but perhaps most important for us is the presentation of the 2018 class of C&EN’s Talented 12. Now in its fourth edition—and for first time sponsored by Thermo Fisher Scientific—this feature recognizes young talent and trailblazers in the chemical sciences globally. You can read about the winners and their projects on page 38. You can also read about what is keeping previous winners busy on page 70.

During the Boston meeting, the 2018 class of winners will be participating in a half-day symposium, where they’ll be giving TED-style talks. Our keynote speaker will be Harvard University’s David Liu. We recently wrote about him in C&EN, and I, for one, am looking forward to what promises to be a fascinating presentation.

For the first time we’ll be doing a live recording of our podcast, Stereo Chemistry. In its few months of existence (as you may know, we launched it in February) this podcast has become very popular with C&EN readers, so we thought this was a great opportunity to try something exciting and different. There will be an audience, celebrity guests, a quiz, prizes­—you name it!

For those who can’t attend, fear not. You’ll be glad to learn that we are going to be recording the Talented 12 talks, as well as the podcast, and will release them at a later date. If you’d like a heads up for when they become available, keep an eye out for our weekly e-newsletter after the meeting.

In addition, as we have now been doing for the past couple of years, we’ll be hosting a number of Facebook Live events to give those who cannot attend in person a flavor of what is going on. The schedule is available at cenm.ag/liveinboston, and of course you’ll be able to access these broadcasts at any point via our Facebook page.

Finally, we’ll also be producing a pop-up newsletter for each day of the meeting to highlight and summarize what will be happening. Whether you are attending in person or following from afar you can register for it at cenm.ag/newsacsboston.

See you in Boston!

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.