Program

Plenary lecturers

Dr. Chris Hawes is a lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at Keele University in the United Kingdom. His research interests are in the field of structural coordination chemistry with a focus on functional ligand design in Metal-Organic Frameworks and discrete supramolecular species, for applications in gas separation and fluorescent sensors. He also serves on the editorial advisory boards for CrystEngComm and the Journal of Coordination Chemistry.

Dr. Volker Kahlenberg is professor for Technical Mineralogy and Crystallography at Innsbruck University, Austria. His research focuses on applied and structural aspects of inorganic high-temperature materials, including in-situ diffraction studies, phase transitions, polymorphism/polytypism, and modulated structures. From 2017 until 2023 he served as a member of the Commission on Inorganic and Mineral Structures of the International Union of Crystallography.

Dr. Franc Perdih is Full Professor at University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Prof. Dr. Franc Perdih research interests are vanadium and zinc coordination compounds with potential antidiabetic action in connection with solid-state and solution-state structures. Furthermore, his research activities are devoted also to supramolecular chemistry and crystal architecture of organic and coordination compounds with a focus to the influence of weak non-covalent interactions. He is Editor-in-Chief of Acta Chimica Slovenica and member of editorial boards of Bioinorganic Chemistry and Applications, Symmetry, Journal of Chemistry and Macedonian Journal of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

Dr. Tibor Tóth-Katona is Senior Research Fellow at Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Wigner Research Centre for Physics,
Budapest, Hungary. Research interest of Dr. Tibor Tóth-Katona concerns thermotropic liquid crystals, primarily non-equilibrium pattern forming systems (such as, first order phase transitions, viscous fingering, electro-hydrodynamic convection), liquid crystal polymers and elastomers, liquid crystal–polymer interface, suspensions of liquid crystals (ferronematics), and photochromic liquid crystals. He is an editorial board member for Polymers and Frontiers in Soft Matter journals. 

Asst. Prof. Matic Lozinšek is a senior research associate at the Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a co-founder of the Extreme Conditions Chemistry Lab. His main research interests encompass synthetic inorganic fluorine chemistry, noble-gas compounds, X-ray crystallography, high-pressure experiments in diamond anvil cells, and fluorinated materials for energy storage. He was awarded the European Research Council Starting Grant.

Dr. Irina Konovalova is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Single Crystals, Kharkiv, Ukraine and as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany. Her main research interests are weak intermolecular interactions including non-conventional hydrogen and σ-hole bonds, stacking, interactions of anions with π-systems. In general, she investigates supramolecular architecture and polymorphism of organic compounds. Dr. Konovalova combines experimental X-ray diffraction data and quantum-chemical calculations to obtain a systematic fundamental knowledge about features of various types of intermolecular interactions including weak ones and predict the supramolecular architecture of a crystal.