Dear Friends and Colleagues,
A Message from the Congress Chair,
Hello,
As the Association of Food Technology, we finalized another international congress on food technology with a great success. I then express my gratitude to the members of the Organizing Committee for all their hard work and marvelous performance throughout these 3 days and to the members of the Scientific Committee for their great efforts in evaluating many of the abstracts before the Congress. I, indeed, admit that I did not expect our Congress with such a high foreign participation and success due to the ongoing war in very near to our country borders. Most of the participants, especially from Europe, USA, and Canada have emphasized the same subject by telling that "they remain undecided whether to come or not even till the last minute due to this war, but after their arrival they found out that they gave a very smart decision on coming".
The success of all congresses is considered by the number of attendants to the first/early in the morning sessions of the congress' on the last day. Our Congress is very successful when viewed with the terms of this evaluation. In other words, "A congress becomes a success only if participants attend". So, I would also like to thank to all participants once again for their contributions and express my thanks to all speakers and the chairs of the sessions, who helped the Congress work.
We have had 434 presentations from 38 different countries including Turkey at this Congress, these are: Algeria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lithuania, Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, People's Republic of China, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, South Korea, Switzerland, the UK, Ukraine, the USA, and Tunisia.
Within these presentations, the current situation of food science and technology has been discussed and we made some key decisions after hearing about new technologies and methodologies for global solutions to enhance food technology. I think we would all agree that the quality of the presentations in the Congress have been a high standard.
I have again but clearly learned at our Congress that submitting an abstract just on the last day or after the deadline of abstract submission is not only a habit of Turkish colleagues but also becomes a normal behavior of colleagues from most of the European countries. In addition to this, we tried to do our best to accept all requests for poster and/or oral presentations of the colleagues from the Middle East, the Near East, the Caucasus, the Central and Western European countries, but of course we were also unable to accept all of them.
We are also very proud in giving financial support to 23 young scientist and/or students for registration to our Congress and accommodation at the Congress Hotel. They all worked as Congress Staff during the Congress. Providing them a sense of responsibility and an experience of being a part of this Congress, is admittedly one of the primary tasks of the Association of Food Technology-Turkey.
With the support of RSC Advances, The Royal Society of Chemistry, we also announced the names of finalists of poster awards at the closing session of our Congress. Dr. Ho Soo Lim from South Korea received the 1st poster prize with poster number 498. Dr. Aylin Altan from Turkey received the 2nd poster prize with poster number 538. Dr. Jovanka Laličić-Petronijević from Serbia and Montenegro received the 3rd poster prize with poster number 535. All of the winners presented with a hardcover scientific book of RSC Advances and a framed certificate.
In addition to the Congress's participants, 58 people attended to the food microbiology course that was done on the previous day of the Congress. Twenty six of them attended only to this course while the rest also attended to our Congress.
Besides, we had a fling at the gala dinner. We danced a lot and I believe we can all agree that we will not forget this gala dinner.
Some of the foreign participants also enjoyed visiting Turkey after our Congress. They joined to the tours of Pamukkale, Efes, Sirince, Izmir, Istanbul, and Cappadocia. They took photos and shared their positive experience in social networking sites. They contributed to the tourism potential of Turkey. This is also an indirect task of the Association of Food Technology-Turkey.
All my friends in my team really worked very hard and spent a lot of effort both before and during our Congress and we got exactly the spiritual response of these efforts. As a result, we have done really a great job.
All abstracts, presentation slides, photographs, video recordings (permission received ones) will be published both at the Congress' web site and Congress' facebook address very recently; hence please keep following these web sites.
I hope we showed you the Traditional Turkish Hospitality from our hearts. We hope to further strengthen the cordial relationship established amongst us during the Congress.
Hope to see you again in Turkey, perhaps Cappadocia, in 2018
With my best regards,
Prof. A. Kadir HALKMAN
