The objective of this collaborative grant is to support US students to disseminate their research results and interact with international researchers at the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference in Montreal, Canada from May 31-June 3, 2014. Due to its geographical location outside the US, it has been difficult for US students to attend the conference. The approach to overcome this difficulty is to use this grant to partially support the travel costs for the student attendees, plus other contributions from the departments across the country and the Institute of Industrial Engineers, so as to increase students' participation. This grant will help promote student research activities and active involvements in international conferences. By attending this conference, students can present their recent research developments, attend tutorial sessions to learn advanced research methods, join panel discussions, participate in student paper/simulation competitions, and socialize with scholars and students from other universities. These activities will significantly help and motive students to explore research frontiers and consider joining academia as one of their career paths.
If successful, this award will help US and international students to communicate and learn from each other the most frontier research progress. It provides an excellent opportunity for US students to network with potential employers and to explore collaborators for their future research. This grant will also support underrepresented students to attend this conference.
This project provided $10K travel support to students to attend the 2014 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference (ISERC) in Montreal, Canada. We used this budget to stimulate broader student participation for ISERC 2014. With the funding from NSF, plus other contributions from 21 Industrial Engineering departments/programs across the country and the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE), we have successfully funded 40 students. Meanwhile, the travel awards were competitive (over 90 applicants) and were considered as honors for those awarded students. In this way, this grant did attract more students to apply and accordingly helped increase the number of student attendees for ISERC 2014. We announced Travel Grant Application Process and Selection Criteria on April 7, 2014 and selected the final 40 awardees on April 14, 2014. Our selection was based on the following criteria, and the top 40 ranked scores were selected. (1) Matching support for the corresponding department (2 points if yes, 0 otherwise) (2) The presented work is supported by NSF grant (1 point if yes, 0 otherwise) (3) Graduating year (1 point if yes, 0 otherwise) (4) Submitted a full paper (3 points), an abstract (1 point), or a poster (1 point) for the conference. (5) Other factors including diversity and underrepresented group, doctorial colloquium, and student volunteer are considered. In general, this grant helped promote student research activities and active involvements in international conferences. Meanwhile, the ISERC is an important annual research conference for the Institute of Industrial Engineering Society. In addition, the ISERC Applied Solution Conference focusing on solutions to real-world industrial problems was held concurrently for the first time. It provided an excellent opportunity for this grant to attract graduate and undergraduate students to attend the conference and network with practitioners and potential collaborators. Besides, some Ph.D. students were able to participate in the Doctoral Colloquium hosted by CIEADH and IIE to learn from experts on job search, teaching and research activities, and professional services. Students also took this chance to publish their works in high quality conference proceedings indexed by ProQuest. Finally, underrepresented students were encouraged and awarded (among 40 awardees, 17 are female students) by this grant to attend the conference.
