Symposium on Materials for a Sustainable Future (September 11th/12th 2009)

To celebrate Rex’s 70th birthday we held a meeting at Birmingham. The aim was to hold a meeting on a subject that is dear to Rex’s heart and to have a good knee’s up and see old friends. The idea was to have a packed day of science on Friday with a more relaxed social event on Saturday. It turned out that the meeting ended up as a bit of a CEAM reunion. For those of you who are not aware, CEAM was the Concerted European Action on Magnets that began in 1985. As Mike Coey said in his introduction to the symposium “CEAM was a pioneering experiment in Europe-wide cooperation on a topic that presented a serious technical challenge, the development of rare-earth iron permanent magnets. At its height, CEAM involved more than 80 industrial and academic groups, who pooled their expertise, and the latest knowledge, to advance the understanding of materials properties, processing and applications of these novel materials. Many exchanges between partners have led to lasting links between them, and the creation of a European permanent magnet community.”