This project supports two activities at the 2015 Summer Biomechanics, Biotransport and Bioengineering Conference (SB3C2015), held June 17-20, 2015 at the Snowbird Meeting and Conference Center, Snowbird UT. These activities are designed to increase the participation rate for females and under-represented minority researchers at the conference by offering travel fellowships, and to sponsor the Ph.D. student paper competition by defraying attendance costs for Ph.D. student finalists in the competition. In this way, this award promotes the education of, and furthers the careers of, female, student and minority attendees. The long-term goal is to help develop these individuals to become future leaders in bioengineering. The theme of the meeting is "Synergy of Modeling and Experiments in Biomechanics, Bioengineering and Biotransport". Its primary purpose is to promote state-of-the-art research, collaboration, and international scientific discourse in the broad field of bioengineering with focus on biomechanics, biotransport, biomaterials, tissue engineering, rehabilitation and design. This meeting has evolved from the long-running and highly successful annual Summer Bioengineering Conference series, first run in 1993. The 2015 Conference name has been changed to better reflect the enlarged scope of the meeting, as well as the different sponsorship structure. The selections of the plenary speaker, workshops, and highlighted sessions will serve to inform, educate and inspire attendees about the importance of and pathways for translating their technologies. All presentations are documented in the two-page extended abstract format and compiled in a USB drive (also posted on the conference web site), available to all registrants. Copyright is provided and an ISBN number issued to allow appropriate archiving of the conference material.
The specific NSF funding requests are: 1. To sponsor travel fellowships and a mentoring/advancement workshop for females and under-represented minorities (URM). We will offer travel awards for women and URM students to attend SB3C2015, with preference to target these fellowships to junior undergraduates in SB3C-related disciplines interested in graduate school. Fourteen awards will be given with support/encouragement to ask department chairs and Deans to fund the rest of the student's travel. This will achieve the mission of bringing greater diversity to SB3C, providing an exciting opportunity for women and URM students, and potentially increasing the pool of women and URM graduate students in SB3C-related disciplines. 2. To sponsor the extremely popular Student Paper Competition by covering the meeting attendance costs of the 36 Ph.D. student finalists. All abstracts submitted are 2-page extended abstracts and the Ph.D. student finalists are selected after a rigorous review process (3 reviewers per abstract). Six finalists for each technical area are selected by the student paper committee and the students present their work in 6 parallel podium sessions to compete for best paper awards in a number of subfields related to the overall theme of the conference.
