Final Report of the 14^th ISMAR Conference

The 14^th ISMAR conference was held in Rhodes, Greece on August 19-23, 2001. The conference was organized by Gil Navon from Tel Aviv University and Zeev Luz and Daniella Goldfarb from the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Originally, Jerusalem was chosen as the site for the 14^th ISMAR conference. Much to our regret, events in the area made it necessary to move the conference out of Israel On February 2001, the organizing committee, after consulting with the local advisory board and the ISMAR Executive Committee decided to hold the conference at different location. The Island of Rhodes was chosen in order to preserve the Mediterranean flavor.

The Scientific Program was composed of 9 plenary lectures, 3 EPR medal presentation lectures and 117 invited and contributed lectures presented in 24 sessions. Over 140 posters were presented during the poster sessions. Topics of the Symposia and Poster sessions included; Solid state NMR, EPR and ENDOR spectroscopy, High resolution NMR&endash;structural biology, Biological Systems, Materials and Techniques, MRI, EPR imaging and more. 280 scientists and students attended the conference. They came from 26 different countries with large delegations from Israel (52), USA (50), Germany (35) and Japan (28).

The conference opened with the welcome reception on Sunday, August 19^th, with a welcome address from Gil Navon, the conference chair, and from Danny Fiat, the founder of the ISMAR society. The welcome was followed by two plenary lectures:

NMR and MRI under alien conditions &endash; A. Pines

The protons in solid state NMR - S. Vega.

The other plenary lectures were presented in the following 4 days of the conference:

Studies of proteins by solid state NMR: insights into catalysis, and prospects for uniformly labeled systems &endash; A. McDermott

Modern ESR methods for the study of proteins and membranes &endash; J. H. Freed

Biomolecular NMR structure determination in dilute liquid crystals &endash; A. Bax

Assignment and structure determination by high-and &endash;low-resolution solid-state NMR &endash; B.H. Meier

Intermolecular multiple-quantum coherences and their application to NMR and MRI &endash; W. S. Warren

The electron spin as a spy: structure-function relationship in photosynthetic proteins &endash; W. Lubitz

Quantitative BOLD functional MRI - P.C.M. Van Zijl

The ISMAR Prize was awarded to J. Jeener for his long lasting contributions to the field. Unfortunately. Jeener could not attend the conference and his planned lecture - Dynamical instabilities in high resolution liquid NMR was not given.

J. Pilbrow presented the recipients of the EPR medals: K. Mobius, G. Denninger and C. Corvaja who gave the following talks in a special plenary session:

K. Mobius - High &endash;field EPR on site-directed spin-labeled bacteriorhodopsin mutants: tracing polarity effects and conformational changes along proton pathways.

G. Denninger &endash; Spins in nanostructured semiconductors/

C. Corvaja &endash; Time resolved EPR of radical-triplet and biradical-triplet pairs.

The conference ended on Thursday, August 23 with the closing remarks of J. S. Waugh, the ISMAR Chairman. The social events of the conference included a tour by night of the medieval city of Rhodes and a tour to the acropolis of the city of Lindos, followed by dinner and local dances.

The organizers would like to thank the speakers, the session chairs, the poster presenters and the participants who made this conference a success. We acknowledge the valuable advise of the ISMAR Executive Committee, the International and the local advisory boards. Special thanks go to our many sponsors for their generosity. We would like also to take this opportunity and thank the Conference Secretariat for the excellent organization of the conference (especially under the circumstances of a last minute change of venue).