Molecular engineering is rapidly emerging as a new engineering discipline that seeks to address some of humanity's grand challenges by providing solutions that rely on a bottom-up approach, where molecular concepts form the basis for proposed strategies. This grant will provide partial travel support for 25 junior US-based researchers to attend the Frontiers of Molecular Design and Engineering Symposium, that will be held on September 27-28, 2018, at the Institute for Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago. The symposium will address multiple themes within the broad interdisciplinary sphere of molecular engineering. It will provide an excellent opportunity for the junior researchers to be informed about the current state of the art of and emerging research opportunities through scientific presentations and discussions with leading scholars and experts from the US and abroad. The Symposium aims at attracting ~150 participants.
Molecular engineering carries the potential to deliver novel systems, materials and devices of unparalleled efficacy and efficiency. It is an approach that is transforming almost all traditional engineering fields and which inherently depends upon cross-fertilization of developments in physics, chemistry, biology, and computational sciences. Graduate programs aim at educating a new generation of researchers with the appropriate skills, knowledge, and multidisciplinary framework to tackle current and future societal challenges. The proposed symposium will provide a forum to disseminate accomplishments to date, and to inform the engineering and scientific communities at large of emerging opportunities in research and education. A noteworthy feature of the symposium is that it will specifically target undergraduate and graduate students interested in molecular engineering and expose them to the latest developments. The primary aim of the symposium is to disseminate the importance and relevance of molecular engineering in the context of emerging scientific and engineering challenges facing humanity. The format of the symposium has been conceived to stimulate discussion and the exchange of ideas. One of the key outcomes of this effort will be a better understanding of the areas of molecular along with a distilled set of emerging needs and possible solution strategies. This information will be compiled into a report to the National Science Foundation and published in the journal Molecular Systems Design & Engineering to facilitate dissemination amongst the research community. Another, important outcome of the symposium will be to expose engineering students from across the country and from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to molecular engineering, its promise and its future.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
