Ton Peijs chaired the 2008 Gordon Research Conference on Composites. The conference was held in Ventura, California from 13-18 January and attracted the worlds best researcher in "Multi-Functional Composites by Nano-Scale Control". The Gordon Conference on Composites has been running since 1975 and this years meeting was the first ever to be oversubscribed.

The delegates debated diverse topics from biological structures to next generation space craft materials and parallels between multi-level human control of material structures and structural control in materials synthesised by nature.