UPCON’26

The 5th Conference on Properties, Design, and Applications of Upconversion Nanomaterials (UPCON’26) will take place from April 12–17, 2026, at the Hotel Continental in Brno. The organisers, Hans Gorris and Zdeněk Farka from the Department of Biochemistry, are looking forward to welcoming more than 100 international participants.

The UPCON conference is a forum for discussing advances in the field of upconversion nanomaterials among researchers from academia and industry and for defining future trends in the field. The scientific sessions include lectures by keynote and invited speakers, as well as talks and poster presentations selected from submitted abstracts.

Keynote speakers are Bruce Cohen from the Molecular Foundry in Berkeley, USA, with a talk on Teaching old nanoparticles new tricks, Fan Zhang from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, with Second near-infrared window fluorescent probes for in vivo dynamic multiplexed bioimaging, and Satu Lahtinen from the University of Turku, Finland, with Minimizing the nonspecific binding of upconverting nanoparticle bioconjugates to reach ultrasensitive bioaffinity assays.

The UPCON conference series originates from The European Upconversion Network (COST action CM1403) that was coordinated by Hans Gorris and Tero Soukka from 2014 to 2018. The 1st UPCON in Wrocław (Poland) in 2016 and the 2nd UPCON in 2018 in Valencia (Spain) were organized as both Summer School and Conference, whereas the 3rd UPCON in 2021 in Compiègne (France) was an online conference (UPCONline 2021) due to COVID-19. The 4th UPCON was held in Montréal (Canada) in 2024 during a total solar eclipse.

More information is available on the Conference website
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