Geoanalysis Conferences

The 10^th Geoanalysis conference took place on 8–13 July 2018 at Macquarie University in the northern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. The attendance was good with 104 abstracts being presented during the five-day event. The Geoanalysis conference series is well-known as an excellent setting where delegates discuss recent technical advances in a relaxed atmosphere, and the 2018 excelled at this important tradition. Parallel sessions were avoided, with roughly two-thirds of the contributions being presented in poster format. The emphasis on posters within the conference’s overall structure was a success, as they formed the focus of the late-afternoon social events over three of the days. This structure provided many opportunities for researchers to directly interact with those scientists working most closely to their own research field.

Another tradition of the Geoanalysis conference is the mid-week field excursion: the Macquarie conference organizers provided an excellent excursion to the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney, where field trip participants were able to see how decades-long environmental contamination has impacted communities associated with the export of Australia’s natural resources. Also, certain to be long remembered, was the conference dinner organised as an evening cruise around the historic Sydney Harbour. Another highlight of the 2018 Geoanalysis conference was the celebration of the many scientific accomplishments made by Jon Woodhead of the University of Melbourne.  Jon has been a pioneer in many key aspects of both laser ablation analysis and in isotope ratio determinations using the inductively coupled plasma ion source. In recognition of Jon’s many important contributions, he received the IAG’s top award as an Honorary Fellow of our association.

Also noteworthy were two student awards for excellence, which were sponsored by Macquarie University.  In recognition of both the high impact of their geoanalytical research and for the exceptional quality of their presentations, Alicja Wudarska of the Polish Academy of Sciences (lecture format) and Zsanett Pintér of Macquarie University (poster format) received their awards prior to the Friday afternoon closing session.

Dr Regina Mertz-Kraus and Dr John Creech acted as guest editors of a special issue of Geostandards and Geoanalytical Research based on papers presented at Geoanalysis 2018. In all eleven papers were published in 2019, eleven in volume 43, number 3 and the remaining four in volume 43, number 4.