First time in Philadelphia a success for Pittcon 2013

Philadelphia, PA – Pittcon 2013, the 64th Conference and Exposition for Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, which ended on Thursday, brought together more than 18,000 attendees; 40% of whom came to the conference for the first time.

Pittcon has always had a strong global presence, and 2013 was no exception with 28% of attendees being from outside the United States; top countries by attendance were Canada, China, United Kingdom, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil. Attendees include lab managers, scientists, chemists, researchers and professors, from industrial, academic, and government labs. They represent an equally broad number of scientific disciplines including life science, food science, drug discovery, environmental, forensics, nanotechnology, water/wastewater, energy/fuel, agriculture and bioterrorism.

The exposition floor consisted of 1,011 exhibitors from 28 countries occupying 1,925 booths displaying the latest innovations in instrumentation and technology used in laboratory science. This year, 167 first-time exhibitors were welcomed. There were three specialized areas on the floor —Life Science, Laboratory Information Management (LIMS) and New Exhibitors.

More than 2,000 technical sessions presented in 78 symposia, 12 awards, 93 oral sessions, 12 workshops and 62 posters. Approximately 40% of the presentations focused on life science topics.

In 2012, The Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation signed an agreement under which the conference has received an endowment to undertake educational training and development in laboratory sciences with special emphasis in resource limited countries worldwide. Therefore, we have renamed our plenary and keynote lecture in honor of Wallace H. Coulter.

The Wallace H. Coulter Plenary Lecture, presented by Nobel Laureate Sir Harry Kroto, was attended to a capacity audience followed by a complimentary mixer. The Wallace H. Coulter Keynote speaker, R. Barnett, discussed his research and findings on the Large Hadron Collider and the experiments and nature of the Higgs boson.

Next year’s Pittcon 2014 takes place from March 2-6 in Chicago.