This is an NSF travel grant that supports students, post doctoral fellows and faculty frpm US academic and nonprofit research institutions to attend the 4th Pacific Basin Conference on Adsorption Science and Technology (AST) to be held in Tianjin, China. The AST conferences were established in 1997 in order to promote scientific collaboration in the area of adsorption science and technology among scientists and engineers, especially those from Pacific Basin countries. The primary goal and hence intellectual merit of the 4th Pacific Basin Conference on AST is to allow scientists and engineers from the Pacific Basin Region to present their most recent research efforts in the area of Adsorption Science and Technology and to outline further developments in this area. In particular, this will allow US participants from academia and industry to interact with their international counterparts and especially to enhance and/or establish collaborations and scientific exchange with adsorption researchers from the Pacific Basin Region. The conference will cover a wide variety of adsorption related fields from fundamentals to applications, and consist of plenary sessions, oral sessions and poster sessions. The conference will last for four and one-half days, and host approximately 150 participants from around the world, with about ~ 20 participants from the US. About one-half the US participants will be eligible to receive a travel supplement from the NSF with the following stipulations. Only tenured and tenure-track faculty members and their students in US educational institutions and researchers in US nonprofit research institutions (limited to one faculty member and one student per departmental unit), who will have an oral or poster presentation at the meeting will be eligible to apply for this NSF support.
The broader impacts of the 4th Pacific Basin Conference on Adsorption Science and Technology are mainly associated with the publication of the conferences proceedings volume. Over 100 papers have been accepted for plenary, oral and poster presentations at the 4th Pacific Basin Conference on Adsorption Science and Technology. The hardcover conference proceedings containing most of these papers will be edited by Professor Li Zhou and published as a special of the journal Adsorption. It will be available to all the participants at the conference and adsorption researchers from around the world after the conference. This publication should have significant archival value, as do the proceedings volumes from the 2nd and 3rd Pacific Basin Conferences on Adsorption Science and Technology.