The annual ISPM conference series was founded in 1999 by David Allison (U Tennessee, USA), Heinrich Hörber (EMBL, Germany) and Mervyn Miles (U Bristol, UK) with the first conference taking place in Seattle, WA, USA.

The early conferences had the title: “SPM, Sensors and Nanostructures”; this was later simplified to ISPM.

Each year, the conference location has moved to a venue on a different continent in the sequence: The Americas, Europe and Asia – although there have been exceptions to this sequence. So far, the conferences have been held at:

• 1999                 Seattle, U.S.A.
• 2000                 Heidelberg, Germany
• 2001                 Tokyo, Japan
• 2002                 Las Vegas, USA
• 2003                 Oxford, U.K.
• 2004                 Beijing, China
• 2005                 Cancun, Mexico
• 2006                 Montpellier, France
• 2007                 Jeju, South Korea
• 2008                 Seattle, U.S.A.
• 2009                 Madrid, Spain
• 2010                 Sapporo, Japan
• 2011                 Munich, Germany
• 2012                 Toronto, Canada
• 2013                 Dijon, France
• 2014                 Seoul, South Korea
• 2015                 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• 2016                 Grindelwald, Switzerland
• 2017                 Kyoto, Japan
• 2018                 Tempe, AZ, U.S.A.
• 2019                 Louvain La Neuve, Belgium
• 2020                 Boulder U.S.A. – delayed owing to pandemic to virtual conference in 2021
• 2024                 Sapporo, Japan

Videos from some of these conferences can be viewed here.