1508687 (Murthy) This award is in partial support of the Symposium on Stakeholders Perspective on the Bioeconomy. The biobased economy has potential to produce biofuels and bioproducts in an environmentally sustainable way. Despite governmental and private support to create a new bioeconomy through research, pilot scale testing, university industry consortiums and financial incentives, this promise has not been realized completely at commercial scale. Challenges in feedstock logistics and conversion technologies have received attention of researchers and many solutions are being developed to address these challenges. Unfortunately, practical issues faced by producers and processors have received less attention in peer reviewed literature. The S-1041 multistate committee consists of researchers from more than 15 land grant universities working on various facets of bioenergy and bioproducts such as feedstocks, biochemical and thermochemical conversion, techno-economic and life cycle assessment. Annual meetings of the S-1041 multistate committee are held to coordinate and share research from land grant universities across the nation. In the last few years, symposiums were organized with leading researchers and speakers from funding agencies to share the latest research knowledge and coordinate future research. The 2015 S-1041 multistate committee meeting will be held in OARDC (Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center), Ohio State University, Wooster, Ohio, August 10-11, 2015. In contrast to past symposiums, the S-1041 multistate committee membership decided to focus the 2015 symposium on obtaining perspectives from stakeholders in the bioeconomy.
The goal of the 2015 symposium is to develop an understanding of challenges in the evolution of the bioeconomy from a stakeholder perspective. This information will be used to further develop and coordinate the research agenda for the S-1041 committee and will guide research on biofuels and bioproducts in over a dozen land grant universities across the nation. This is a meeting where the students can interact with the entire sector of the bioeconomy including researchers, producers, processors, financial sector and government agencies. This will help in orienting the next workforce generation to challenges and opportunities in the bioeconomy. Therefore, the NSF funds will support attendance of graduate and undergraduate students to the meeting through travel awards. The proceedings from the symposium will be published in both hard and soft copy formats and distributed widely to interested audience across the nation by S-1041 members. Additionally, a white paper will be developed at the end of the conference and will be made widely available.
