Travel support for invited speakers to attend 86th ACS Colloid and Surface Science Symposium at Johns Hopkins University, June 10-13, 2012

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

1201597 PI: Bevan This award will partially cover travel costs associated with invited speakers attending the 86th ACS Colloid and Surface Science Symposium at Johns Hopkins University, June 10-13, 2012. Invited speaker participation is critical to the meeting's success in terms of attracting the best contributed talks and exposing graduate student attendees to the state of the art in the fields of colloid and surface science. The intellectual merit of the 2012 colloid and surface science symposium at Johns Hopkins University is that it provides a forum for communicating fundamentally new insights into colloidal and surface science with relevance to existing complex fluids and advanced materials applications as well as emerging nano- and bio- technologies. Due to its broad scope, this meeting typically attracts 500-700 attendees from diverse disciplines (e.g. Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science, Physics, etc.) and nearly all major US academic institutions and many leading international institutions. The diversity of the attendees and the talks is further represented by contributions from theoretical, computational, and experimental groups and the participation of scientists and engineers from all sectors including industry, government, and academia. This symposium provides an opportunity for all attendees, including graduate students, to disseminate their own research findings and to learn about the latest work of invited plenary and keynote speakers who represent the best internationally recognized investigators working on problems involving colloid and surface science and engineering. The broader impacts of this proposal are that funds from the NSF will be used to ensure the participation and attendance of premier researchers at our symposium, and thus guarantee dissemination of state-of-the-art research to all attendees as well as an impact on the education and training of graduate student attendees. This meeting has traditionally been a good forum for graduate students, and we expect that about a quarter of the meeting attendees will be graduate students presenting oral presentations or posters on their PhD projects. By acquiring travel support the best domestic and international speakers, this support is in line with NSF's mission to disseminate research findings from NSF supported research and educate and train students to create tomorrow's high tech work force. The requested funds will support invited speaker travel via reduced registration costs so they can participate in the meeting with preference given to groups traditionally under-represented in science and engineering discipline.