This award supports travel for students, postdoctoral associates and young faculty in order to attend STATPHYS-23, the 23nd International Conference on Statistical Physics, to be held in Genoa, Italy, 9-13 July, 2007. The award is supported by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, the Chemistry Division, the Physics Division and the Division of Materials Research.
Statistical mechanics is a cross-disciplinary field with practitioners coming from chemistry, mathematics, biology, physics, computer science and the engineering sciences. Every three years, this community assembles results and to plan future work. These meetings are sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). This triennial series of meetings started in Florence in 1949 and continues to the present day. Starting with the 1986 meeting in Boston, the NSF has been awarding travel grants to enable young investigators without other support to participate. The meeting has not been in the U.S. since 1986, so many young scientists have not had the opportunity to participate. This award will enable 15-20 graduate students and young researchers to participate in STATPHYS-23. A selection committee representing a cross-section of senior scientists has committed to undertake a fair selection of a balanced group of "NSF Scholars," representing all disciplines of the statistical mechanics community and paying particular attention to qualified female and minority candidates.
The award will contribute to the scientific infrastructure of U.S. science by permitting young people to participate in a major international meeting. It will strengthen the ties of these young people to their peers in Europe and other foreign countries. Past experience has indicated that those graduate students who have been awarded grants have found the experience to be extremely important in their career formation.
