Scientific report on the conference “Theory of metal atoms, clusters and nanoparticles interacting with organic matter”
Helsinki, Finland
June 10th – June 12th 2015

View the full conference report here.

Due to recent progress in nano-fabrication there is a large, growing interest in stabilized metal-organic hybrids. However, at present not many computational ab-initio studies have been performed and they are scattered across different fields and communities. The workshop goal was then to address current challenges and successful methods to study the electronic properties of organo-metal nanocomposites bringing together leading scientists working both on ground and excited state electronic properties of organic stabilized metal complexes.

The total number of participants was slightly increased to 32 out of the 30 initially planed. There were 17 invited speakers and 3 contributed speakers. Out of the invited speakers, a percentage of 41 % were women, comparable to the ratio typically reached in the best conference in clusters, the Gordon Research Conference on Noble Metal Nanoparticles (with for example 32% women speakers in 2012). The format of talks with 10 minutes reserved for discussions prove to be adequate for the mixture of communities that was present. All the sessions were fully attended as can be seen from the picture taken in the final talk. Feedback from the participants was very high. It was expressed personally to the organizers that such a space for discussing advances in different communities is extremely needed. It is expected this workshop will increase the number of computational scientists doing research in these systems, strengthen the theoretical community and therefore will boost the scientific developments in this very complex research direction.