95 Analyst, February 1996, Vol. 121 Foreword SAC 95: An International Conference on Analytical Chemistry In planning the 1995 version of the Society for Analytical Chemistry Conference, which was held in the University of Hull on July 11-15, the conference organizers decided to make two major changes to the traditional format. The first change was to have all of the submitted papers presented as posters, the programme or oral presentations being composed entirely of invited papers. The second change was to reduce the length of the Scientific Programme to three days. To this end, the Friday afternoon was reserved for social events while the whole of the Monday plus the Tuesday morning were devoted to a national conference, also on the subject of Analytical Chemistry, entitled Research and Development Topics in Analytical Chemistry.The latter meeting is organized annually by the same organiza- tion as the SAC conferences, namely the Analytical Division of The Royal Society of Chemistry, and is devoted to descriptions. in oral or poster form, of recent research projects by students of analytical chemistry in British and Irish universities. The thinking behind this move was that some of the students might be able to stay on and visit all or part of the SAC Conference, while some of the SAC conferees could hear the students giving their lectures and view their posters. A further innovation at the SAC Conference was to include a discussion period at the end of many of the poster sessions in which each presenter showed a few overheads and used them to expand on the theories behind the work described in their poster. Discussion was moderated by one of the Invited or Plenary Lecturers from the corresponding lecture session and some of these sessions were a great success. In all, the meeting was made up of 6 plenary lectures, 28 invited lectures and 200 poster presentations and was attended by about 300 people.This issue of The Analyst contains six papers from the conference. Other papers have already been or will soon be published in Analytical Communications, while it is probable that future issues of The Analyst or the Journal of Aiialytical Atomic Spectrometiy will feature further papers, which can be identified by the appropriate footnote to their title. The organizers hope that the papers will prove useful and of interest to readers of The Analyst and, for those who attended the Conference, a reminder of the excellent science that was described and discussed in July, 1995, in Hull. R. A. Young Publications Liaison Member, Organizing Committee