Following Nara in Japan in 2012, Paris is honored to host the joint conference 13^th  International Conference on Radiation Shielding (ICRS-13)  & 19^th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection & Shielding Division of the American Nuclear Society -2016 (RPSD-2016), from 3^rd to 6^th of October 2016. This conference explores the scientific, technological and engineering issues associated with particle and ionizing radiation shielding in its broadest context, including nuclear energy systems, accelerator facilities, lasers, space, medical area and other radiation environments. It is one of the premier international events dedicated to this multidisciplinary radiation shielding field, regularly attracting hundreds of the world's top scientists and engineers.

The 50^th Anniversary of the First Radiation Shielding Symposium, celebrated in 2008, recalled the towns where ICRS has been successively held. In 1972, Paris hosted the ICRS’4; in 2016 that will make 44 years since. Indeed, the present Honorary Chairs, Jean-Claude Nimal (CEA) and Enrico Sartori (OECD/NEA), were both active participants and the privileged witnesses of these international meetings.

The ICRS 50th Anniversary commemoration raised awareness of the thematic richness of the Radiation Shieldingstudies from its very beginnings. But we can also gauge the progress made by this discipline and the associated conferences so far by the huge international audiences drawn to Radiation Protection & Shieldingdisciplines. That has been accomplished by opening up progressively and naturally to other fields than nuclear fission applications, namely fusion, nuclear medicine, particles physics, space, homeland security, radiation industrial use. Nevertheless, the original intellectual mark of their founders has been maintained through the continuous renewal of both calculation and measurement methods and strategies as well as by the application to ever more diverse and complex physical configurations.

Furthermore, from a purely symbolic point of view, the so-called “Composition VIII” of the “avant-gardiste” painter Vassily Kandinsky (Russia, 1866 – France, 1944) can be perceived as a sublimated vision of the Radiation Protection & Shielding field, thanks to its warm and cold colors, thanks to its mixing of straight and curved drawing lines, thanks to its colored Cartesian, triangular and circular patterns.