In order to review and tackle fascinating recent achievements and developments in crystallography, we in Croatian Association of Crystallography, have, developed the concept and launched the first edition of Hot Topics in Contemporary Crystallography – a high level workshop intended to the utterly ambitious PhD students and postdocs, as well as to the young crystallographers in the early stages of their autonomous carriers, conducting their research within the broad spectrum of disciplines and sub disciplines related to crystallography.

It was held from May 10th to 15th, 2014 in Šibenik, Croatia and it was a central event to mark the UN proclaimed the International year of crystallography in Croatia. The workshop was a great success – we had 27 students and 6 lecturers from 15 countries.

All students obtained bursaries which partly or entirely covered their onsite expenses thanks to the generous support from IUCr, ECA and a long list of commercial sponsors. There was no registration fee for this event. Six “hot topics” were tackled:

  1. Hot topics in macromolecular crystallography (by prof. dr. Elspeth Garman, University of Oxford, UK),
  2. The whole is more than the sum of its parts (by prof. dr. Hans-Beat Bürgi, University of Bern, Switzerland),
  3. Charge density (by prof. dr. Dietmar Stalke, University of Göttingen, Germany), A
  4. Absolute structure and absolute configuration (by prof. dr. Howard Flack, University of Geneve, Switzerland),
  5. Twinning in crystallography (by dr. Regine Herbst-Irmer, University of Göttingen, Germany), and
  6. Advanced solutions from the Cambridge Structural Database (by Pete Wood from Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, UK).