A highly successful symposium, "Materials Research at High Pressure," was held at the 2006 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston. The symposium was jointly sponsored by Livermore National Laboratory and CDAC, and featured 59 scientific presentations (42 oral presentations and 17 posters). Invited speakers included Jonathan Crowhurst of Livermore, Vadim Brazhkin of the High Pressure Institute at Troitsk, Yoshinori Katayama from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, David Ceperley from the University of Illinois, Igor Goncharenko from the CNRS Gif-sur-Yvette, Ho-kwang Mao from Carnegie and Karl Syassen of the MPI Stuttgart.

Convened by Carnegie CDAC-affiliated staff member Alexander Goncharov, Roberto Bini (University of Florence), CDAC Laboratory Partner Riad Manaa from Livermore, and CDAC Director Russell Hemley of Carnegie, the symposium also featured two tutorial sessions. Yusheng Zhao, a CDAC Laboratory Partner from Los Alamos National Laboratory, led the session on "Synthesis and Characterization of Nanocomposite Superhard Materials" in which practical approaches for the synthesis of these novel materials was outlined. The session on "Synthesis and Characterization of Large CVD Diamonds," led by Carnegie's Chih-shiue Yan, explored new methods for determining the composition-property relationships in diamond fabricated using a new high growth-rate process.

An MRS proceedings volume for the symposium is in preparation.

A wide variety of CDAC-supported research was also presented at the 2006 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held in San Francisco from December 11-15. Fifty-six abstracts were submitted and included invited talks, contributed talks, and poster presentations. CDAC graduate students Lowell Miyagi (UC-Berkeley), Zhu Mao (Princeton), Chris Seagle (Chicago), and CDAC postdoctoral associate Stephanie Japel (New Mexico State) gave presentations at the meeting. Talks were also presented by CDAC-affiliated Carnegie Staff members Ronald Cohen, Russell Hemley, Przemek Dera, Alexander Goncharov, Yingwei Fei, and Burkhard Militzer. Undergraduate students Frances Reid (Carleton College) and Ben Haugen (University of Colorado) presented work that they had completed at Carnegie during their summer internships with the CDAC group. The work of high school student Alexander Levedahl (pictured at right with CDAC Research Scientist Maddury Somayazulu) on hydrogen clathrates was featured in Russell Hemley's talk, "Planetary Fluids under Extreme Conditions."