A Summary and Some Concluding Remarks

To present a summary of IAU Symposium 265 it is perhaps best to first step back and ask the question “Why did we meet in Rio to discuss chemical abundances?”. Part of the scientific rationale was to host a meeting that brought together researchers who probe chemical abundances and chemical evolution in all of the different astrophysical environments. All meetings should be planned such that they have an outcome and, with such a diverse set of abundance specialists brought together in one place to talk about their favorite topics, the stated outcome for IAUS265 was to provide, within our current understanding of the universe, a unified picture of the production of chemical elements over cosmic time; such a view is what I think of as cosmochemistry.