GRAND CHALLENGE & HACKATHONS

As a new addition to Congress, the introduction of a Grand Challenge stream seeks to unite the pure and applied scientists around six defining themes for the coming decade. The new stream is designed to dovetail with established RACI Divisions, enabling topical cross-over with Division sessions. During the registration process, presenters will be offered the option to tick a box if they would also like their talk considered for a session (if they have not registered directly for the session). This will allow conference organisers to ensure the seven streams are populated with both new scientific ideas and application/implementation methods. Further to this, Hackathons (brainstorming meetings) will be available during evening libations, prompting cross-pollination of ideas between traditionally siloed pure and applied science disciplines: these Hackathons can carry sponsorship opportunities.

This stream will target both chemical and environmental engineers, focussing on the basis for identifying and remediating contaminants in natural waterways and the environments they support. Further, the stream can extend to the role of climate change in affecting the distribution of water across ecosystems, enabling disciplinary participation from ecology and climatic (computational) modelling.
Explores Earth's geological and environmental history through an interdisciplinary lens not limited to geology, geochemistry, geobiology, geophysics, organic geochemistry and palaeontology. It focuses on the role of advanced analytical technologies, critical minerals, geonomics, biomarker geochemistry and computational modelling to understand past life, extinction events, and geological processes. The session also aims to provide insights into future climate and environmental challenges by examining past extinction events and their connection to climate change.
This stream primarily targets chemical and electrical engineers in its focus on decarbonization of conventional energy sources, growth and support for renewable energy generation, and – critically – the enabling pathways for the production and utilisation (combustion) of alternative fuels, particularly for chemical vectors of energy storage and transmission.
This stream focusses on advanced production methods for emergent materials, including the use of additive manufacturing, novel catalysts and reactions, and frontier purification technologies. The role of advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing is of particular interest in the session, as the complexity and individualisation of pharmaceuticals continues to increase.
This stream aims to explore the role of chemistry and machine learning (AI) in novel technologies to enable personalised health monitoring and disease detection, alongside agricultural science and technology to enable resilient food production and distribution. The impact of improved agriculture on climate change, food scarcity, and human health provide tremendous opportunities to deploy innovative chemistry.
This stream focusses on the advanced dimensions of modelling that would not traditionally be found in RACI Divisions (e.g., DFT in Physical Chemistry). Within this, the stream aims to explore the physics and chemistry behind emergent quantum computers, alongside the advanced methods for data compression/prediction (machine learning, ensemble learning) and simulation (computational fluid dynamics and molecular dynamics) that benefit from such computational breakthroughs.
This stream targets both novel technologies to capture carbon (drawing heavily on absorption and adsorption in chemical engineering) alongside emergent utilisation (reaction engineering) and storage/monitoring (reservoir engineering and geoscience). Across all three domains, the stream will seek to unite the development of novel chemistries (e.g., new adsorption materials) and processes (e.g., direct air capture).