Welcome to the 21st International Conference on Spectral Line Shapes

Dear Participants and Guests On behalf of the Rector's Office, welcome to St. Petersburg University, one of the oldest, largest and most prestigious universities in Russia. The 12 Colleges Building (named after the Collegia of Peter the Great's time, Ministries in the modern sense of the word) has been home to the University since 1804. St. Petersburg State University is the successor of the first Russian University founded by Peter the Great on 24 January 1724. It's distinguished faculty members include mathematicians Chebyshev and Smirnov, physicists Lenz and Fock, chemists Mendeleev and Butlerov, embryologist Kovalevsky, and physiologist Sechenov. Several of our alumni won Nobel Prizes – Pavlov, Semenov, Kantorovich, Landau and Prokhorov. The University is the alma mater of two presidents of Russia, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. St. Petersburg State University today consists of 19 faculties on two campuses: in the historic downtown, on Vasilyevsky Island, and in Peterhof. The Faculty of Physics carries out research projects through the efforts of 260 employees, of which 150 hold doctoral degrees, and 50 have been awarded Grand Doctorates. The work is done in a vast variety of areas, from the physics of elementary particles to the physics of the atmosphere. Optics and spectroscopy has been a particularly significant area of research. This field of inquiry goes back to the work of Academician D S Rozhdestvensky more than 70 years ago, when he first suggested his famous hook method. After him the work was headed by S Frisch, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of Optics and Spectroscopy Journal. Today research projects in optics involve over 50 staff members, graduate and post-graduate students. Work involves projects on spectroscopy of cold and hot plasma, atomic and molecular spectroscopy, non-linear spectroscopy and spectroscopic analysis. Our scholars support active international ties with their colleagues worldwide. The organizing committee of the conference has not forgotten about the cultural and tourism significance of the host city, with Hermitage and the Russian Museum, memorial museums of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Mariinsky and Mikhailovsky Theaters being only a few of the many places to visit. Early June is the time of white nights, the best time to visit the environs of St. Petersburg with its many imperial palaces and parks, and attend multiple music and theater festivals. This is just the right time to tak