Editorial: 13th Pannonian international symposium on catalysis

Reac Kinet Mech Cat DOI 10.1007/s11144-017-1179-x Editorial: 13th Pannonian international symposium on catalysis Siófok, Hungary (September 19–23, 2016) József Valyon1 • István Pálinkó2 Received: 15 March 2017 / Accepted: 15 March 2017 Ó Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2017 The participants of the symposium mostly arrived from the Pannonian region in a wider sense, i.e., from Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. Most of them were active in the area of heterogeneous catalysis. The symposium was part of an ongoing conference series organized biannually alternating in the member states. The previous symposium was held in the Czech Republic, and the next one is going to be organised in Slovakia. One of the major goals of this symposium series is to provide forum for PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, where they can communicate their results in front of a friendly and, at the same time, highly professional audience. The more experienced peers help the improvement of the younger ones with their questions, remarks and suggestions. Therefore, most of the oral presentation possibilities are kept for younger researchers. Senior participants give keynote talks (one by each member state) providing with wider perspectives about certain topics in heterogeneous catalysis. This time 57 oral presentations were performed in two parallel sessions, and the same number of posters were displayed. They were on from the beginning to the end of the symposium. The scientific level of the symposium was further increased by invited top scientists, who gave their views on hot topics in the form of plenary lectures. They were István Halász (PQ Corporation, USA—the synergism between experimental and theoretical approaches in zeolite catalysis), István Horváth (City University of Hong-Kong, Hong-Kong—immobilized homogeneous catalysts in green chemistry applications), Vasile Parvulescu (University Bucharest, Romania— selectivity increasing effects of graphene-based catalysts). One of the major result of the symposium was that Romania joined as participating country to the Pannonian symposium series. After the symposium in Slovakia, the Romanian & István Pálinkó 1 Research Center for Natural Science, Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest, Hungary 2 University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary 123 Reac Kinet Mech Cat Catalysis Society is going to organize the next symposium. As part of the closing ceremony, the newly-founded Zoltán Paál prize was awarded to Dr. Gabriela Grzybek of Poland. Zoltán Paál was an internationally recognised catalysis scientist, who died about two years ago. The prize was established by his family for his commemoration. The organization of the symposium was promoted by the conference organizers of the Hungarian Chemical Society. Their work is gratefully acknowledged. Some presentations were converted to scientific papers and published in this special issue. Thanks are due to authors for submitting their works. The papers give a good cross-section of the topics the symposium dealt with during its four working days. We are sure that the papers make useful and scientifically exciting readings. 123  (...truncated)