Proposal Number: CTS-0630519 Principal Investigator: Segre, Carlo Affiliation: Illinois Inst of Technology Proposal Title: Sponsorship and Expanded Young Investigator Support for the SRMS-5 Conference
This grant will provide partial support for the fifth International Conference on Synchrotron Radiation in Materials Science (SRMS-5) to be held in Chicago from July 30 to August 2, 2006. This conference has, since its inception in 1997, been promoting the application of synchrotron radiation to engineering research. The grant will partly cover the costs of the conference, but more importantly, will enable the participation of a cohort of young scientists and engineers who might otherwise not be able to attend. Synchrotron radiation provides an expanding number of novel, sensitive, and enabling tools and techniques for scientists and engineers in all major disciplines. The U.S. Department of Energy has constructed and is operating four major synchrotron facilities and the NSF and individual states are operating several others in the ultraviolet to x-ray spectrum. With the availability of these state-of-the-art facilities and their powerful characterization and fabrication techniques, there is increasing interest in exploiting them for innovative and frontier research in diverse engineering fields. Synchrotron radiation allows researchers to look, probe, examine, image, analyze, and fabricate in ways that have not been possible before and whose potential is just beginning to be realized. Applications in the thermal sciences, in materials characterization, and in micro and nano-manufacturing are especially encouraging and fall in several of the NSF priority research areas. The conference will bring together leading scientists and engineers from a wide array of fields including materials science, nano-science and engineering, thermal processes, engineered materials, surfaces and interfaces, and others. With NSF support for the conference, participant support will be provided for ten young engineers and scientists to attend SRMS-5. The selection of the ten awardees will be made in a two-step process, starting with screening of applicants by a subset of the conference organizing committee and followed by final selection by the PIs who span the engineering and science disciplines and have significant synchrotron experience. By supporting the attendance of young researchers at SRMS-5, the conference can help to accelerate the adoption of synchrotron radiation techniques in the engineering community.
