The International Conference “Strangeness in Quark Matter” (SQM-2015) was held on 6-11 July 2015 in the Veksler and Baldin Laboratory of High Energy Physics of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research.

The Conference was held in Russia for the first time!This is one of the most prestigious and important conferences on physics of nuclear matter under extreme conditions of high temperatures and densities. Currently, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the relativistic heavy ion collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States study nuclear matter of maximum achievable temperature. The nuclear matter with maximum possible in accelerator experiments density which is formed in collisions of heavy ions will soon be studied only in Dubna at the unique collider complex NICA which is being developed at JINR.

SQM’2015 is the fifteenth in a series of conferences previously held in Birmingham (UK) in 2013, Krakow (Poland) in 2011, Buzios (Brazil) in 2009, Beijing (China) in 2008. The beginning of this series of conferences was initiated in Aarhus (Denmark) in 1991.

Dubna has been chosen to host the SQM-2015 by the Council of 30 famous scientists from the world’s leading research centers, due to great interest of the international scientific community to implementation of the NICA project in Dubna. Only in a few years, experiments planned for NICA will obtain data which will give information of unprecedented accuracy that will help to shed light on many key questions of fundamental science. Among them:  systematic of strange particles production in hadron collisions, behavior of resonances in strongly associated quark-gluon matter, the Equation of State at finite compression and finite temperature, strange quark matter in astrophysics, in conditions similar to those that occur in centers of neutron stars and which existed in the early Universe. The NICA project and has a great significance for development of the world’s scientific research infrastructure.

The conference “Strangeness in Quark Matter” was attended by over 250 scientists from all over the world. For the first time the latest data obtained in experiments at CERN and RHIC were presented. In 42 plenary reports, more than 100 presentations in five parallel sessions and 43 poster reports reflected the current status of research was presented, as well as directions of scientific research for years ahead were outlined. The SQM-2015 Conference should emphasize priority research in the frames of the NICA project and the prospect of world science in this direction.

The Conference was followed by two satellite meetings. On Sunday, July 5, in the International Conference Hall the Round Table “Physics at NICA” was held; it had two main objectives. Firstly, it is a discussion of the current status of preparations for experiments at NICA and their theoretical justification, which is being summed up in the so-called “White Paper” of the NICA. Secondly, it is development of bilateral cooperation between South Africa and JINR in implementation of the NICA project and signing of a Memorandum.

The second meeting which preceded and accompanied the SQM-2015 was the Helmholtz International Summer School “Dense Matter”, which opened on Monday, June 29 and lasted for two weeks, and 56 participants and 16 lecturers also took part in the conference “Strangeness in Quark Matter”.

Involvement of young scientists and their specialized training in areas relevant to current and future experiments is the main goal of the summer school programme, which was established by the agreement on cooperation between the Helmholtz Research Centre (Germany) and JINR, Dubna, Russia (2014-2016) in the frames of the programme Dubna International Advanced School of Theoretical Physics (DIAS-TH).

The past Summer School on Physics of dense matter related to the research programme on the NICA gathered in Dubna young scientists from 25 countries; they represent the young face of this field of science and future participants of experiments at the accelerator complex NICA which is being developed at JINR.