I spent last week attending the International Conference on Rheology in Lisbon, Portugal. This is the biggest conference in the field, and is held every four years. It alternates continents: in 2004 it was in Korea, and in 2008 in California. The next one, in 2016, will be in Kyoto, Japan. There were about 1000 people there, and 11 parallel sessions of contributed talks. It was a very intense conference, with talks starting at 8:30 AM and running until 6:30 PM. They even had poster sessions during the coffee breaks, so there was very little time to sit and catch your breath! However they had a good social program, including a port-tasting evening, a half-day bus tour on Wednesday afternoon, a beach party, and a banquet, so there was a bit of time to see some of the sights, to talk shop and get to know some people.

I enjoyed most of the talks I attended and got several good ideas, which for me is the mark of a good conference. Now all I need is time, and money, and students to turn the ideas into reality …. One thing that impressed me was the breadth of subjects that were covered, and how the flow of complex fluids impacts many diverse areas of research and application. There were lots of talks about blood flow, for example, and blood clotting. Also lots of talks about nanocomposite materials made of polymers mixed with carbon nanotubes or graphene. There were very applied talks about polymer processing and highly theoretical talks on trying to predict bulk properties based on molecular structure, which is one of the holy grails of the field. Most talks were well presented and interesting.

My own talk was scheduled for late Friday morning, the last talk in the last contributed session on the last day of the conference. To make matters worse, one of the talks in my session was cancelled, so everyone drifted off to other rooms for a while. Most of them came back, however, and I had enough of an audience – about 20 people – for my talk to make it worthwhile. Since it was the last talk, there was time for quite a good discussion and question period after.

I enjoyed Lisbon and would go back to see more of the city if I had the opportunity. It reminded me of Rio, perhaps not surprisingly, but was better looked after and not as crowded. Restaurants were relatively inexpensive and the 20 words of Portuguese I picked up in Brazil served me well! The weather was great – low 30s and sunny all the time.

Now it is back to reality, with two courses starting in a couple of weeks and a to-do list a mile long.