The 49th Conference of the European High Pressure Research Group (EHPRG) was held in Budapest (Hungary) from 28 August to 2 September 2011. This issue of High Pressure Research hosts the proceedings of this meeting.
Like most of the EHPRG conferences held previously, the 2011 conference covered a broad scientific domain, including theoretical physics, chemistry, geosciences and special emphasis was put on technical aspects and on applications in material sciences, food technology, bioscience and biotechnology.
The number of participants of the EHPRG meeting in 2011 exceeded 200.
All the European countries were represented and a number of participants from Japan, USA, Thailand, Brazil, Israel, India, Canada, Iran, Argentina and Australia were also present. The four biggest delegations came from France, Spain, Japan and Germany. The number and distribution of the participants proved the vitality of this field of research in the world, particularly in Europe.
Four plenary and 27 oral sessions were organized, for the latter two or three were running in parallel.
The decision on granting the EHPRG Award was taken by the president and secretary of the EHPRG and it was given to Miriam Marqués (MALTA-Consolider Team, Spain, and University of Edinburgh and CSEC, UK) for her work ‘Electride behavior of the alkali metals under pressure’. Besides the award lecture, 4 plenary, 23 invited, 79 oral lectures and 112 posters were presented.
As the organizer of the conference I wish to acknowledge first of all the members of the scientific advisory committee who helped the organization to maintain the high quality of the presentations and for suggesting excellent plenary and invited speakers. I also wish to acknowledge and thank the work performed by chairpersons of the various sessions and the valuable contributions of all the referees of the papers collected and published here for their work in maintaining the high quality of the journal High Pressure Research. Finally, I would like to thank all the lecturers and participants, whose contributions created the conditions for fruitful and stimulating discussions.