Meeting Review: 34th Waterborne Symposium

The 34th annual Waterborne Symposium was held Feb. 14-16 at the New Orleans Marriott. Hosted by The School of Polymers and High Performance Materials at The University of Southern Mississippi, this year's event showed a marked improvement in attendance and number of short courses over last year's symposium, which was held just five months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. This year's symposium featured 158 attendees and of those 25 came from outside the U.S. In addition, the symposium featured 35 short courses, up from last year's 21.

In his opening remarks Robson Storey, symposium chair, announced a name change for the event, which will now be called the Waterborne Symposium. This year's event presented a new expanded theme, "Advances in Intelligent Coatings Design." According to Storey, the program will retain its emphasis on waterborne, high solids and powder coatings, but will also address other contemporary themes including stimuli-responsive coatings, bio-based and renewable coatings and high-throughout methodologies for formulation. The 28 papers presented at this two day event provided a variety of information on these cutting-edge technologies.<