The International Conference on Exotic Nuclei and Atomic Masses (ENAM) has gained the status of the premier meeting for the physics of nuclei far from stability. The selected and refereed papers presenting the main results constitute valuable proceedings that offer everyone working in this field an authoritative and comprehensive source of reference.

The ENAM2001 Conference was held on July 2-7, 2001 at the Rantasipi Aulanko Hotel in Hameenlinna in southern Finland. The conference was organized by the Department of Physics and the Accelerator Laboratory of the University of Jyvaskyla with support from the Physics Departments of the Universities of Helsinki and Turku. This conference, Exotic Nuclei and Atomic Masses has now gained the status of a major nuclear physics serial conference. The previous conference was held in Bellaire, Michigan, USA. The conference was first held in 1967 in Lysekil, Sweden, then entitled Conference on Nuclei Far from Stability. ENAM2001 welcomed 270 participants from 34 countries, including 17 accompanying per sons. The content of the program was selected based on the advice of the International Advisory Committee. The Committee members read and considered 253 submitted abstracts in selecting oral contributions. During the conference week 76 invited and oral talks were given. The rest of the contributions were presented in dedicated poster sessions. Many thanks go to the speakers of oral and poster presentations for their enthusiasm and for the high quality of their work which demonstrated the liveliness of the field. Participation in the lectures was high and contributions from the audience were important towards the success of this conference. The organizers would like to especially thank Cary Davids of Argonne National Laboratory for his comprehensive summary talk, which is also included in these Proceedings.

This volume contains the refereed and selected contributions from the International Conference on Quark Nuclear Physics (QNP2002), held from 9 to 14 June 2002 in Jülich, Germany. It covered the following topics: - Structure and Spectroscopy of Hadrons - QCD-Inspired Quark Models of Hadrons and Nuclei - Effective Theories - Lattice Gauge Theories - Soft and Hard Hadronic Processes - Soft and Hard Electroweak Processes - Medium Modifications of Hadrons - Matter Under Extreme Conditions and Quark-Gluon Plasma - Heavy-Quark Physics

This book is a collection of talks presented at the International Symposium on Exotic Nuclei, held at Lake Baikal, Russia, on 24 - 28 July 2001. The talks were given by the leading scientists in the physics of exotic nuclei.Among the topics of the Symposium were the following: production and study of properties of nuclei in extreme states, strongly deformed nuclei, highly excited nuclei and nuclei far from the line of stability as well as nuclei having large angular momenta.New results of investigations are presented in the book ? in particular, the data on new nuclei with proton or neutron haloes, on the changes in the shell structure of nuclei near the drip lines, and on the structure of exotic nuclei, including information on the island of inversion. The latest results on the synthesis of new superheavy elements are also provided, and existing detecting devices and accelerators of exotic nuclei, as well as future projects for the creation of similar set-ups, are presented.

It is known that nuclear shells play a particularly important role in the collective motion of nuclear matter and, as a consequence, determine the structure of nuclei, nuclear dynamics, nuclear decay models, etc. In 1999 the nuclear shell model turned fifty, and the 49th meeting on Nuclear Spectroscopy and Nuclear Structure was devoted to nuclear shells in their various manifestations. The talks presented at the conference covered a wide range of experimental and theoretical studies.