The meeting, organized by the Formulation Science and Technology Group of the RSC, took place in the GSK facilities in Weybridge. We had 27 participants and 13 speakers. About half of the participants were from industry and half from academic institutions.

The aim of the workshop was to identify how modelling can aid in formulation design, going from basic understanding of physicochemical phenomena, to more pragmatic approaches that correlate structure and function of systems.

We started with an extraordinary lecture given by Prof. Daan Frenkel, who talked to us about packing of spheres and other objects. We had two talks on modelling systems containing surfactants, one by Dr. Fernando Bresme and the other by Dr. Henry Bock, who cover topics on atomistic and mesoscopic simulations. Prof. Andrew Masters talked to us about the behaviour of charged systems, in particular of polyelectrolites. Dr. Ard Louis gave a talk on self-assembly of monodisperse composite objects, from simple structures to virus capsules, while Dr. Leo Lue presented some of the challenges in modelling granular flow.

On a different note, Dr. David Nicolaides discussed the advantages and limitations of SOAP, and Accelerys software for modelling formulations, and Dr. Elizabeth Colburn presented and approach where neural networks are used to determine the properties of formulated products. We wrapped up the meeting with two excellent talks, one from Dr. Antonie Schlijper and one from Dr. Jerry Winters, who gave an overview of the current capabilities and limitations in predicting the properties of formulations, and their views on the future of the area.