Water is a substance of crucial importance to the life on our planet. Understanding and predicting its properties as a pure substance and as a component of more complex systems have therefore been longstanding goals of research in several fields of science and engineering. Although properties of aqueous systems have been studied for many centuries, new and surprising information is brought to light through developments in experimental techniques and theoretical methods. Progress is also being made in developing connections between fundamental physical and chemical properties of aqueous systems and their roles as components of the Earth's ecosystem. Understanding these properties is also crucial in developing new technologies in many areas including heterogeneous catalysis, bioengineering, nanoparticle synthesis, development of new energy sources, and environmental cleanup.

The Water & Aqueous Solutions GRC is an important venue for presenting the advances in this field, starting from a fundamental molecular perspective. The topics that the GRC covers evolve in response to scientific advances in the study of aqueous systems. As the program shown below indicates, in addition to liquid water and aqueous solutions, the systems and phenomena that will be discussed include aqueous clusters, nucleation, amorphous ice forms, clathrates, adsorption and transport of electrolytes in ice, structure, dynamics and reactivity at the liquid-vapor interface, self-assembly, hydrophobicity, and the role of water in the structure and function of proteins and biological membranes. The program of the 2006 GRC reflects many important recent advances achieved through application of novel experimental and theoretical methodologies. Among these are new insights into solvation of charged species in aqueous clusters, discovery of metastable amorphous ice forms and the possibility of a liquid-liquid phase transition, new insights from nonlinear spectroscopy and theory into the fast dynamical processes of the hydrogen bond network, novel experimental probes and simulation results for the properties of aqueous systems, and characterization of mesoscopic-scale phenomena such as self-assembly, hydrophobic confinement and protein folding.