International Symposium on Frontiers in Materials Science 2013 Chairmen’s Foreword

In April 2009, the Leibniz Prize recipient and vice president of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, the German Science Foundation) Prof. Dr. Konrad Samwer from Georg-August Universität in Göttingen gave the first DFG “Leibniz Lecture” in Hanoi, Vietnam. During his visit to Vietnam National University, he proposed the idea about the organization of a bilateral German-Vietnamese seminar on Materials Sciences, which would bring the scientists from the two countries together for a closer collaboration in the development of modern science in South-East Asia. The first German-Vietnamese Workshop on Frontiers in Materials Sciences (Hanoi, October 20–22, 2010) and Second Joint German-Vietnamese Symposium on Frontiers in Materials Sciences (Frankfurt, October 6–9, 2011) were the next fruitful steps along this line. At that time, the organizers decided to extend the bilateral meetings to a larger scale of an International Symposium on Frontiers in Materials Sciences (IS FMS), which would certainly be more beneficial not only for the Vietnamese and German scientists, but also for the scientists from other countries.