The very first Auger Symposium took place in 1975 in Jülich, Germany. Since then it has regularly featured as one of the satellite meetings held in conjunction with the International Congress of Radiation Research (ICRR, which takes place every four years). In keeping with this custom, the meeting in Oxford will immediately precede ICRR 2019 (Manchester, UK; August 25-29th 2019), allowing participation of both meetings.

Next year will see the centennial anniversary of the joint discovery of the Auger effect by Lise Meitner and Pierre Auger. Far from being redundant, Auger processes underpin a vast field of disparate sciences. This is witnessed by over 20 000 entries since the previous Auger symposium in 2015, when the search term “Auger electrons” is entered in Google scholar. Of these, over a 1000 publications are referenced in Pubmed alone. The focus of the Auger symposia on the medical application of Auger electrons for targeted radionuclide therapy has mainly been driven by the desire for single cell targeting due to the exquisitely short range and high ionisation density around the site of decay. However, there have been many refinements in related fields of Nuclear Physics updating the emission spectra of Auger electron emitters as well as Radiochemistry and Molecular Biology with novel targets and chelation chemistry that have bearing on the medical use of Auger electrons.

In the current context where Nuclear Medicine is experiencing a renaissance with several recently FDA approved radionuclide therapies, the ideal of pursuing single cell targeting with an Auger-electron is more relevant than ever.