Editors:
D. Baskaran and S. Sivaram
Wiley-VCH, 2006
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Content
doi:10.1002/masy.200690120
Preface
The
IUPAC Symposium on Ionic Polymerization, held once every
two years, is a typical gathering place for people working
in the field of ionic polymerization. Recently, one
such symposium was held in Goa, India from October 23-28,
2005. It is for the first time that such a specialized
symposium has been organized in India. The Council of
Scientific and Industrial Research, Department of Science
and Technology, Indian National Science Academy and Reliance
Industries Limited, India generously sponsored the Symposium.
The conference provided an opportunity to the Indian scientific
community to interact with leading scientists working
from around the world in the area of ionic polymerization.
The
Symposium was conducted at the salubrious environment
of The Leela, a resort hotel near Colva Beach
in Southern Goa, India. The technical program of the symposium
consisted of 52 oral presentations and 38 poster presentations.
A total of about 150 participants drawn from USA, France,
Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and
India attended the symposium. The elegance of the technique
of ionic polymerizations is the ability to synthesize
polymers with well-defined architectures without any side
reactions such as termination and transfer. As the control
of the polymerization becomes the motivation, atom-transfer
radical polymerization, which has similar attributes of
ionic polymerization and is a more recent addition to
the armory of synthetic methods available to polymer chemists,
was also included in the symposium. The technical program
of the symposium was organized into morning and afternoon
sessions chaired by two eminent persons one from India
and another from abroad. The order and sequence of presentations
were carefully blended so that each session had a flavor
of both established as well as young practitioners in
the field of anionic, cationic, and controlled radical
polymerization.
We
would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere
thanks to all the speakers and participants for accepting
our invitation and contributing to the success of IP 2005.
We hope that the contributions presented in this special
volume of Macromolecular Symposia would be of interest
to all those who are interested in contemporary methods
of polymer synthesis. We appreciate the timely help of
all the reviewers and authors to bring out this special
issue.
Durairaj
Baskaran,
Swaminathan Sivaram