This grant provides funding to partially cover the travel expenses of selected U.S. participants of the 2011 International Conference on Micromanufacturing, which will be held in Tokyo, Japan on March 7-10, 2011 at Tokyo Denki University. The funds will support a total of 15 researchers from the U.S. to attend the symposium. The conference will consist of three days of technical presentations, panel discussions, and keynote speeches, and a technical tour to RIKEN - The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Ohmori Materials Fabrication Laboratory. The focus of panel discussions will be on energy and sustainability in micromanufacturing, which requires global collaboration to address this challenging issue.
This grant will stimulate technical discussions among researchers in micromanufacturing and foster future collaborations. The benefits to the U.S. researchers attending the Conference will include knowledge gained from the technical presentations and discussions on various micro processes, systems and applications. Japan is one of the world leaders in micro-manipulation, micro-machining, and micro-forming, hence, the requested support will enable many researchers (faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students), scientists and engineers from the U.S. to gain firsthand knowledge of research, development, and implementation of micromanufacturing technologies in Japan.
Partial travel support was provided to US conference participants covering the travel expenses to the 2011 International Conference on Micromanufacturing, which was held in Tokyo, Japan on March 7-10, 2011. The conference had four keynote speakers: (1) Prof. Kumar Wichramasinghe, the Henry Samueli Endowed Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science of the University of California at Irvine, is a pioneer in scanning probe microscopes who provided a historical review of the technology development under his leadership at IBM and his outlook for the latest science and technology development. (2) Mr. Yoshitake Saito, Vice President of R&D and Production of Olympus, who presented the needs and challenges in medical device development. (3) Prof. Phil Coates, Director of Polymer Interdisciplinary Research Center of University of Braford of UK, presented their R&D activities and findings in micro-molding of polymers and polymer nanocomposites. (4) Dr. Hitoshi Ohmori, Chief Scientist and Director of Fabrication Laboratory in Advanced Science Institute of RIKEN, Japan, presented their latest work in electro-chemical and/or mechanical methodologies for machining processes built on the ELID (electrolytic in-process dressing) process developed in his lab. 140 papers were selected to be presented at the conference after a peer review process, with topic areas ranging from micro-machining, machine tools and systems, micro-forming, materials handling, metrology, biomedical and surgical devices, laser processes, texturing processes, micro-molding, EDM processes, to ultrasonic and electrochemical processes. Ten researchers from US were awarded the travel grant. Of those, five were Ph.D. students, one was a post-doctoral fellow and four were associate professors. This grant stimulated the technical discussion among researchers in the field and fostered future collaborations. The benefits to the U.S. researchers attending the conference include the knowledge gained from the technical presentations and discussions on various processes and systems. It is critical for U.S. researchers to be aware of the most recent research conducted worldwide. The grant also provided U.S. researchers, especially the junior researchers, with an opportunity of increasing their visibilities at the international stage.
