It was a valuable opportunity to strengthen collaboration with the community by combining insights, theories, and methods from different fields to address complex issues. In addition, the meeting emphasised the fluidity of disciplinary boundaries and encouraged the free flow of ideas and methods between different fields. This convergence aimed to ultimately foster the best joint R&I approaches for meeting today’s challenges and innovation requirements, including, but not limited to, more sustainability, circularity and resilience in materials’ uses, higher reliability and efficiency in both R&I and sustainability assessment and safety testing of materials.

The MaterialsWeek 2024 highlighted and addressed all relevant R&I aspects along different materials innovation chains, including from up-stream pre-competitive basic research to end-of-life, highlighting and elaborating solutions to the challenges arising in the context of the overarching policies (e.g., the EU Green Deal, Chemical Strategy for Sustainability, Chips Act, Circular Economy Action Plan, Bioeconomy Strategy, Critical Raw Material Act, to name but a few), and their targets (e.g., the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), decarbonisation).

It was a great event that provided an opportunity for materials scientists working in various fields to meet in person, exchange opinions, and present their perspectives on the issues of safety and sustainability in the design of advanced chemicals and materials. Scientists working on different projects but within similar case studies (e.g., energy, mobility, construction, electronics, textiles, health, cosmetics, automotive) met and discussed how collaboration on these projects can enhance the development of next-generation materials that meet safety and sustainability criteria.

One of the major achievements of the conference was the development of a continuously expanding network of materials scientists who can pool their expertise and tools for a common purpose. They also learnt about methodologies and tools previously unknown to them, which can be used in conjunction with their own ones.

The conference organised different sessions on several topics, as well as public community meetings, and training courses and workshops achieving real success as a catalyst for innovative and sustainable materials development by fostering collaboration & sharing insights across diverse R&I communities.

The MaterialsWeek 2024 overall program is available here, as well as a detailed agenda here. The Book of Abstracts is available here. The presentations will be publicly available soon.