North American Solid State Chemistry Conference 2027

History of the meeting

NASSCC has met every two years since 2005, moving between universities across the continent. Its roots go back to the early 1960s, to a biennial meeting of high-temperature chemistry groups in the Midwest.

Paul Gilles at the University of Kansas and Fritz Franzen at Iowa State started the Midwest High-Temperature Conference in the early 1960s, as the students of Gilles's group became faculty at other Midwestern universities. It alternated with the Gordon Research Conference on High-Temperature Chemistry and ran like a large group meeting: students gave short talks and the discussion went deep. Kansas and Iowa State hosted into the 1970s, and the meeting later moved to the University of Toledo, Rice, and Wichita State.

As high-temperature vaporization work waned and solid state chemistry grew, the scope widened and the name became the Midwest High Temperature and Solid State Chemistry Conference; the 1991 meeting at Kansas was the first to carry solid state chemistry in its title. The meeting stayed biennial and informal, now alternating with the Gordon Research Conference on Solid State Chemistry, which began in 1978, so that the community meets every summer. In the 1990s it reached as far east as Cornell and as far west as Colorado State, and invited talks joined the student talks and posters. At Iowa State in 1999 there were four invited talks, by Paul Canfield, Stephen Lee, Alan Goldman, and Marie-Louise Saboungi, and after each one students and postdocs gave short presentations of the posters on display in that session. The 2005 meeting at Notre Dame dropped "High Temperature" from the name, the 2007 meeting at Texas A&M was the first to call itself North American, and McMaster in 2011 was the first host outside the United States. Attendance has grown from roughly one hundred to more than two hundred.

The format has stayed close to its origins: three days of single-session talks mixing invited and contributed speakers, two evening poster sessions, and a conference dinner with poster prizes. Pre-conference workshops on diffraction, machine learning, and outreach have been part of the meeting since 2015. The 2027 meeting in Pittsburgh is the eleventh under the North American name and the first in Pennsylvania.

Further reading: Gordon J. Miller, Some personal reflections on NASSCC and the growth of solid state chemistry at Iowa State University, Solid State Sciences 182, 108496 (2026).