Opening talk -- Calculation of effective interactions -- Potential model description of heavy ion scattering using spline techniques -- Folding models for elastic and inelastic scattering -- Relations between the simultaneous and sequential transfer of two nucleons -- Polarization phenomena in heavy ion transfer reactions -- Nuclear charge and matter distributions -- What do we learn from self-consistent models about nuclear density distributions ? -- Probing the nuclear structure with heavy-ion reactions -- Different regines of dissipative collisions -- Charge equilibration in deep-inelastic peripheral collisions -- Neutron-proton asymmetry and fast fission : Two extreme time evolutions in dissipative heavy ion reactions -- Neutron-proton asymmetry -- Fast fission phenomenon -- Pre-equilibrium processes in nuclear reactions -- Light nuclei far from stability -- Direct proton decay of 147 Tm -- Description of high spin states -- Shape coexistence and a new region of strong deformation in nuclei far from stability -- New directions in studies of nuclei far from stability with heavy ions -- Multiple discontinuities of the moment of inertia at high spin -- Recent results on nuclei far from stability in the mass region a ? 70 -- Fusion and compound nuclei decay for light and intermediate-mass systems: 24Mg, 28Si + 12C ; 24Mg + 24,26Mg ; 28Si + 24Mg, 28,29,30Si -- Nuclear ‘molecular’ states -- The excitation and decay of isoscalar giant resonances -- Heavy ions and giant resonances -- The width and decay-properties of giant resonances -- Spectroscopy of superheavy quasimolecules and quasiatoms.