Organization Committee Chair’s Report
The 1st Asia-Oceania Conference on Neutron
Scattering (1st AOCNS) was held during the period
from 20th November to 24th November, 2011 in
Tsukuba, Japan, which was organized by the AsiaOceania Neutron Scattering Association (AONSA), theJapanese Society for Neutron Science (JSNS) andmany other institutes and universities. This firstneutron conference in the Asia-Oceania region wassurely a historical event.
The JSNS established the pre-organizing committee in2009 to prepare the conference. As everyone knows abig earthquake hit Japan on 11th March, 2011, and thesubsequent Tsunami caused unbelievable destructionof many lives, cities, towns and villages. The nuclear
reactor disaster in Fukushima also caused serious
problems. In such situation the organizing committee
discussed postponement or cancellation of theconference. However, we received many of warm
messages from neutron colleagues of all over the worldand kind supports from neutron facilities in the world.
Encouraged by them the organizing committee decided
to hold the conference as originally scheduled.

The number of the participants was 586; 375 fromJapan, 69 from Korea, 53 from Australia and NewZealand, 30 from Taiwan, 12 from India, 12 fromChina, 10 from Indonesia, 3 from Malaysia, 14 from
Europe and 8 from North and South America. The
number was much larger than we expected. This is a
big success. The organizing committee appreciates
their participation to the conference.
In the conference there were 24 scientific sessions
including various fields such as Fundamental Physics,
Hard Matter, Soft Matter, Chemistry, Materials
Science, Biological Molecules, Industrial Applications,
Complementary Use of Various Methods, and so on.
There were also 8 Facility Reports in the Asia-Oceania
region, Global Cooperation Sessions I and II, andAONSA Prize Ceremony and AONSA Prize Lecture,
which are reported in details in separated articles byProfessor Fujii. Poster Awards to young students werealso arranged. In these sessions, 4 plenary talks, 24
keynote lectures, 35 invited talks, 41 contributed talks
and 386 poster presentations were given. In addition tothe scientific sessions, the conference banquet, 3 social

Group photo of the AOCNS participantsevents, and site tours to J-PARC/JRR-3 were arranged
during the conference. The reports on those can befound in the articles in this issue.
On the first day of the conference, Instrumental
Scientist Workshops (ISWs) were held to discuss thepresent situation and the future directions of theneutron instruments, which is reported by Professor
Shibayama in this issue, and the AONSA Executive
Committee decided to hold the 2nd AOCNS in Sydney,
Australia, 2015.
The organizing committee believes that the conference
was really successful to show the power of neutron
researches in the Asia-Oceania region and the future
directions. This is surely owing to the efforts of allpresenters, International Advisory Board members,
International Scientific Program Committee members,
Local Organizing Committee members, Sub ProgramCommittee members, Conference Supporting members,
many sponsors to support the conference financially,and all of the participants to the conference. We, theorganizing committee, express again our sincere
gratitude to all of the participants to the conference.

The Asia-Oceania Conference on KARAOKE

See you in Sydney in 2015!
Toshiji Kanaya
Chair of the Organizing Committee, 1st AOCNS
Passing a baton to 2nd AOCNS in Closing Session