On May 4-5 the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter hosted a symposium celebrating the year 2000 Nobel prize in Chemistry to Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa for the discovery and development of conducting polymers.

The symposium was a historic reunion of the Nobelists at the University of Pennsylvania where their collaborative work nearly 25 years ago spawned the new field of conducting polymers. The symposium attracted leading international scientists from academia and industry who contributed to the development of the field of conducting polymers. Many former graduate students, research associates and friends of the three Nobelists returned to Penn to celebrate the occasion. The symposium had the atmosphere of both a scientific meeting and family reunion.

On Friday morning the three laureates presented their Nobel lectures to an overflow audience in the LRSM auditorium. Five talks on Friday afternoon traced many aspects of the experimental development of the subject, covering topics ranging from novel syntheses and applications of polyanilines to time resolved optical probes of excited states in conjugated polymers. The session on Saturday morning focused on theory and several speakers emphasized the substantial impact the field has had many areas of condensed matter theory. On Saturday afternoon, the program turned to technology, and highlighted the exciting recent progress in this area, including new forms of integrated circuits and display technologies based on conducting polymers.

At a banquet held in the University Museum on Friday evening President Judith Rodin presented the three Nobelists with the prestigious University Medal for Distinguished Achievement. This marked the first time the Medal was awarded for an outstanding contribution in the sciences. The citations accompanying these Medals can be found at University of Pennsylvania Almanac (v47/n33/PennMedal.html).

The meeting was generously supported by the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, the National Science Foundation, Elsevier Science, and by the School of Arts and Sciences. A special volume of Synthetic Metals celebrating the year 2000 Nobel prize in Chemistry will contain the proceedings of the symposium and will be published later this year.

To view photographs of the laureate's lectures and the Friday evening's reception and banquet, please go to the photos page. Please be patient, there are many images, and it may take some time to download.

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