Wel­come to Thai­land, Bangkok, the City of Angels, rec­og­nized as one of the most excit­ing des­ti­na­tions in Asia, it has all the ingre­di­ents for the suc­cess of the 8th Asia-Pacif­ic Con­gress in Catal­y­sis (APCAT) in 2019. It is with great plea­sure that we invite you to par­tic­i­pate in the 8^th APCAT, which will be held dur­ing 4–7^th August 2019 in Bangkok, Thai­land. The sci­en­tif­ic theme of APCAT encom­pass­es a wide spec­trum of top­ics, includ­ing state-of-the-art and recent trend in dif­fer­ent catal­y­sis research areas which will be cov­ered through ple­nary and keynote lec­tures, oral and poster pre­sen­ta­tions. Catal­y­sis plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in pro­vid­ing a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life, con­tribut­ing to the econ­o­my direct­ly and indi­rect­ly. It is the inno­v­a­tive process­es and prod­ucts devel­oped by research that facil­i­tate and enable improve­ments in the qual­i­ty of life, and it is the meet­ing of minds brought about by con­fer­ences such as the 8^th APCAT that pro­vide the oppor­tu­ni­ties, the inspi­ra­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tions and net­works that aid in the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of new process­es, chem­i­cals, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and mate­ri­als.

It is under­stood and accept­ed that pop­u­la­tions are grow­ing, that the vital resources of food, water and ener­gy are both lim­it­ed and valu­able. There­fore, it is impor­tant to use our resources more effi­cient­ly, to min­i­mize glob­al foot­print and to move toward a sus­tain­able future. We under­stand these chal­lenges, more, we can help dri­ve this notion by demon­strat­ing how through catal­y­sis break­through we can be more effi­cient, reduc­ing our envi­ron­men­tal foot­print and in so doing, reduce the costs of indus­tri­al process­es and devel­op­ing tech­nolo­gies, enabling change. We can design, devel­op and alter process­es to use less water, less ener­gy, to use envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly feed stocks, thus, we present this year theme:

“A breakthrough in catalysis toward efficiency and sustainable future”

Obtain­ing effi­cien­cy and sus­tain­able future through a break­through in catal­y­sis is a far reach­ing theme, includ­ing top­ics such as catal­y­sis for envi­ron­men­tal, ener­gy and chem­i­cal syn­the­sis, indus­tri­al catal­y­sis and pro­cess­ing. We will also devel­op the bio-catal­y­sis dis­cus­sions, includ­ing bio­mass con­ver­sion to bio-chem­i­cals and bio-fuels, and bar­ri­ers to pro­duc­tion.

We will endeav­or to devel­op an attrac­tive pro­gram of top­ics rel­e­vant to the theme and take the oppor­tu­ni­ty of this aus­pi­cious occa­sion for forg­ing new net­works and devel­op­ing new col­lab­o­ra­tions with sci­en­tists around the world. By join­ing with the APCAT the sym­po­sium will bring togeth­er researchers from both inside and out­side of the Asia-Pacif­ic region, to fur­ther research ideals and fos­ter new ideas and rela­tion­ships.

We look for­ward to see­ing you in Bangkok in 4–7^th August, 2019.
 
Piyasan Praserth­dam
Chair­man of APCAT 8