This award will provide financial support for the international conference 'From Stars to Planets - Connecting our Understanding of Star and Planet Formation', to be hosted by the University of Florida in Gainesville on April 11 - 14, 2007. The funding will be used for travel grants for graduate students and invited speakers from US institutions to participate in the meeting.
The conference will bring together researchers from the often separate star and planet formation communities to share recent research results and help motivate future projects to test and improve our understanding of these processes. The meeting comes at a time when many exciting results are appearing from large surveys of star-forming regions that also probe the formation and evolution of protoplanetary disks. At the same time large scale surveys to improve the samples of known extra-solar planetary systems are being initiated, with the potential to strongly test models of planet formation and migration.
As part of the conference program, there will be a public event, 'Starry Night: The Birth of Stars and Planets' to be held at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the campus of the University of Florida, featuring a public lecture by Charles Lada, several other presentations from conference participants, star viewing, and planetarium tours.
The presentations of the conference speakers will be posted on the conference website, which will provide a valuable electronic resource for the attendees and other astrophysicists unable to attend the meeting in person.
