The FEFU campus is located a few kilometers from Vladivostok on the Russian island by Ajax Bay. The area combines scenic views of the Russian Bridge, slung over the Eastern Bosphorus, as well as basketball, football, and tennis courts, buildings with spacious meeting rooms, comfortable lounges and bright lecture halls for events of all sizes. Just two weeks before METANANO kicked off, the Eastern Economic Forum was held there.

“The location for the conference was not chosen arbitrarily. First of all, our laboratory employs a lot of people from Vladivostok. Some of our staff have worked or studied there, and then came to work here at ITMO. However, their colleagues have stayed in Vladivostok, and we plan to collaborate with them in the future. The second reason is that in our country, the Far East gets special attention; the President visited the area not long before the conference”, explained Pavel Belov, the Conference Chair and Head of the International Research Center for Nanophotonics and Metamaterials at ITMO University.

The organizers have prepared a jam-packed five-day program for the participants. Each day of the conference will open with a plenary session, each headlined by one of the several world-class scientists in the field of Photonics and Metamaterials. Among them are Mordechai (Moti) Segev (Israel Institute of Technology), Andrey Rogach (City University of Hong Kong), Jeremy Baumberg (University of Cambridge, UK) and Franco Nori (RIKEN / University of Michigan, Japan / USA).

“METANANO is a unique event for Russia, and is one of the largest conferences in the field of Photonics and Nanotechnology. We gathered participants from the USA, Europe, leading research centers of Asia and Russia. Top skills and excellent lectures from the East and the West came together in Vladivostok. This is the second time this event is being held and we see tremendous progress in terms of the quality of lectures, and the expanding geography of the conference. At the moment we have registered more than 150 participants. We hope that this conference will continue well into the future and will serve as a new space for the growth of science in Russia", — says Sergey Makarov, Chair of the Program Committee and senior researcher at the Department of Nanophotonics and Metamaterials.

The conference will continue until 22 September. Around 100 young scientists, PhD students and invited lecturers will present. On the evening of the 19th of September there will be a round table on the topic “Roadmap for the development of photonics and quantum communication”. On the last day of the conference there will be an guided tour of Vladivostok and  the Voroshilov battery.

Please note that last year, the conference was held in Anapa.