Science frequently works by people making connections between related (or even apparently unrelated) concepts or data. There are many ways of helping people make these connections – attending a conference or seminar, searching journals for published articles and nowadays also searching for data are just a few examples.

WATOC 2020 was just held in 2022 in Vancouver Canada, over one week. With many lectures held in parallel, it is not possible for one person to cover anything like the topics presented, so this is a personal view of some of those talks that I attended. As happens with many such events, common themes gradually emerge and here I highlight just two that struck me as important for the future of computational chemistry. Dispersion .

Conferences can be intense, and this one is no exception. After five days, saturation is in danger of setting in. But before it does, I include two more (very) brief things I have learnt. Sason Shaik introduced a theme he first investigated years ago, but for which no experiment had been devised for verification. He revived his theme when a journalist contacted him last year to report exactly such an observation, which I now recount.

Another selection (based on my interests, I have to repeat) from WATOC 2017 in Munich. Odile Eisenstein gave a talk about predicted^ 13^C chemical shifts in transition metal (and often transient) complexes, with the focus on metallacyclobutanes. These calculations include full spin-orbit/relativistic corrections, essential when the carbon is attached to an even slightly relativistic element.

The triennial conference is this year located in Munich. With 1500 participants and six parallel sessions, this report can give only a flavour of proceedings. Edward Valeev talked about the scaling problem in coupled cluster theories, the so-called gold standard for computing the energy and properties of small molecules.

This second report highlights two “themes”, or common ideas that seem to emerge spontaneously from diversely different talks. Most conferences do have them. The first is “ embedding ”, which in this context means treating different parts of a probably complex molecular system at different levels of theory.