Honorable guests from Korea and Europe, dear association members from Canada and European countries:

It’s with a great honor and an immense pleasure that I wish you a warm welcome to the « Eighth Euro-Korean Conference on Science and Technology (EKC) ». This conference is taking place at Strasbourg universally known to be the City of Europe due to its complex history in Europe for several centuries. Once being in this city with so many European institutions will make understanding Europe better and make oneself more familiar with Europe.

First, I would like to thank all participants for coming to this meeting from afar in spite of long journey and notwithstanding the summer holiday season. I hope that your visit will be largely compensated by nice city environment and rich cultural heritage of this region called Alsace. Second, I would like to thank all of you for communicating and exchanging the scientific knowledge and technical know-hows in the true sense of free cogitating and free trading Homo sapiens sapiens. I also would like to express my special thanks to Professor Jean-Marie Lehn for giving a lecture to share his wisdom with all other participants in spite of his busy summer schedule. I wish we could work assiduously during this meeting according to the spirit of its motto “Scientists and Engineers Working for Better Life”.

This eighth meeting has seen a remarkable progress for one point, i.e. many Korean organisms have actively participated in its organization. In particular, several scientific and industrial sessions were entirely or mostly organized by organisms based in Korea, in contrast with the previous editions where the Korean associations based in Europe kept predominance for the organization. I hope this tendency will further progress for better balance between Europe and Korea and also hope that more participants from Korea will come in the future so that this meeting will become a truly Euro-Korean according to its title. This year’s meeting also includes nine plenary lectures from divers fields covering from fundamental physics to anthropology and economy. I hope the audience will fully enjoy the pure pleasure of learning.

This meeting is funded by gratifying donors, more than 25 in this year, many of them continued to support since the first meeting in 2008. My sincere thanks go to these donors, old and new. I hope they will continue to financially support, bring their ideas and contribute in scientific and technological aspects to improve the EKC together with the actors based in Europe. In particular, our donors contributions are used to help greatly the young Korean scientists studying in Europe for their careers and accomplishments.

Although the principal organizational matters are dealt with by ASCoF, all nine Korean-European associations and KOFST are jointly organizing this meeting in this year. Although somewhat difficult in the beginning, the co-operation between these ten moral persons will improve by time. My thanks go to the eight other presidents of the Korean-European associations and to President Boo-Sup Lee of KOFST for their kind co-operations. To organise this meeting many association members are dedicating their time and energy since several months ago, so I send them my cordial compliments. My special thanks are addressed to all officers of EKC Organisation, in particular to Mr Jong-Wook Lee (Managing Director) and Prof. Chung-Hae Park (Science Program Director). I am also grateful to Specialty Group Heads, Prof. Young-Hyang Park, Dr Bong Yoo, Dr Soo-Hyun Kim and Prof. Seok-Jin Hong. We also owe a lot to the uninterrupted efforts of Dr Young-Saeng Park (Web Program Communicator) and Ms EunJee Kim (Web Design & Art Director) to whom I express sincere gratitude.

I hope that Eighth Euro-Korean Conference on Science and Technology at Strasbourg will bring a lot of friendly encounters, fruitful exchanges and enjoyable symposia.

Strasbourg, 21 June 2015
Gwang-Hi Jeung
President of ASCoF, Chair of 8th EKC