The first SDMC meeting was held in 2004 at IIT-Bombay, and has been held annually ever since. The charge of organizing the meeting is passed cyclically to a group of faculty from the north, west, south, and east zones of India. The meeting is organized usually in a hillside or seaside town. In the past years, the meetings happened in Darjeeling (Ashwani Tiwari, IISER Kolakata and Tapas Chakraborty with the IACS gang), Pondicherry (Upendra Harbola and Sai Ramesh, IISc Bangalore), Mahabaleshwar (Aloke Das and colleagues, IISER and NCL, Pune), Nainital (Srihari Keshavamurthy and colleagues, IIT-Kanpur), and Puri (U. Lourderaj and Himansu Biswal, NISER, Bhubaneswar).

Though the general theme of this conference has mainly remained gas phase spectroscopy and dynamics in the ground and excited states, participants have also given presentations and posters on condensed phase dynamics and biomolecules within the unifying theme of spectroscopy.

A particular aspect of this meeting is that all 80-odd participants stay in the same resort. Hence discussions tend to be extended, be they at a table with pen-and-paper, or at a poster, or at the beach! Indeed, this was the idea of this meeting: a place for the growing chemical dynamics community in India to discuss ideas in an informal atmosphere.

We have been fortunate to have had several participants from abroad at each meeting. Here is a list of those who gave talks in the recent years.

• Prof. Musahid Ahmed, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA
• Prof. Jens Bredenbeck, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Germany
• Prof. F. Fleming Crim, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
• Prof. Otto Dopfer, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
• Prof. José Fernández, Universidad del País Vasco, Spain
• Prof. Asuka Fujii, Tohoku University, Japan
• Prof. William Hase, Texas Tech University, USA
• Prof. Martina Havenith, Ruhr Universität Bochum, Germany
• Prof. Wolfgang Jaeger, University of Alberta, Canada
• Prof. Claude Leforestier, University of Montpellier, France
• Prof. Yoshiyuki Matsuda, Tohoku University, Japan
• Prof. Michel Mons, Laboratoire Francis Perrin, France
• Prof. Klaus Muller-Dethlefs, University of Manchester, UK
• Prof. David Nesbitt, University of Colorado, USA
• Prof. Chi-Kung Ni, Institute for Atomic and Molecular Sciences, Taipei
• Prof. Andrew Orr-Ewing, University of Bristol, UK
• Prof. Timothy Schmidt, University of Sydney, Australia
• Prof. Tamar Seideman, Northwestern University, USA
• Prof. Martin Suhm, Georg-August-Universität Gottingen, Germany
• Prof. Arthur Suits, Wayne State University, USA
• Prof. Anne Zehnacker–Rentien, Université Paris-Sud, France
• Prof. Yunjie Xu, University of Alberta, Canada