This International Conference on Boron Chemistry was the 15th of its kind, and continued in the tradition of previous meetings – to interconnect the worldwide Boron Community. The history of IMEBORON has been established approximately 40 years ago in this country, at Liblice Castle in 1971, when the famous IMEBORON I brought together, for the first time, boron hydride scientist from both sides of, what was at the time, a divided world. In this historical context the dates of the present conference matched closely with the 100 year anniversary of Alfred Stock’s discovery of the boranes in 2012, and 50 years of carborane history. This pioneering research and the outstanding boron chemists that contributed to this field were highlighted in Introductory lectures (Prof. B. Stibr, Prof. V.I. Bregadze, and Prof. N.S. Hosmane) incorporated into the Programme.
During the four decades of IMEBORON the scope of the conference has gradually changed from a focus on boron hydrides to the more advanced and broader exploration of boron chemistry in its many diverse areas. The IMEBORON XV covered fields of inorganic and cluster boron chemistry, boron materials, polymers, ceramics, nitrides and oxides, organic boron chemistry, bio-medicinal chemistry of boron compounds including Boron Neutron Capture Therapy and biologically active compounds. All the wonderful areas of activity in all these fields were addressed at IMEBORON XV. The meeting was attended by 216 registered participants from five continents and 25 countries. The conference programme included two Plenary lectures (by Prof. N.S Hosmane and Prof. E.D. Jemmis), 13 Invited lectures (by Prof. A. Welch, Prof. H. Braunschweig, Prof. G.-X. Jin, Prof. S. Ghosh, Prof. F. Teixidor, Prof. M. Periasamy, Prof. I. Chizhevski, Prof. T.B. Marder, Prof. E. Hey-Hawkins, Prof. Y. Endo, Prof. J. Michl, Prof. S.O. Kang, and Prof. P.S. Weiss), 12 Keynote speakers, 65 Contributed lectures, 21 Flash Poster and 75 Poster presentations. We hope that the meeting brought new inspiration to everyone. Indeed, along with the participation of chemists from well-established groups we also hosted a large number of young scientists and new teams at the conference. This indicates the growing potential of boron chemistry as an active, highly viable and expanding field of science.
This Issue of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which is devoted to IMEBORON XV, consists of full text contributions based on Plenary, Invited and Keynote lectures.
The conference was organized under the generous auspices of Prof. Jiří Drahoš, President of Czech Academy of Sciences and the Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). We also appreciate the outstanding help from the Czech Technical University, the Editors of PAC and the financial support from several conference sponsors.
We thank all of the attendees and participants for their contributions, and look forward to IMEBORON XVI, which will be organized by Prof. Zhuwei Xie in Hong Kong in 2017.
©2014 IUPAC & De Gruyter
