Symposium NN: Protein & Peptide Engineering for Therapeutic and Functional Materials
INTELLECTUAL MERIT: The symposium will provide a forum for scientists and engineers who use proteins and peptides as a critical component in current and emerging technologies ranging from drug delivery to tissue engineering, molecular electronics, and nanotechnology to share ideas and results. Funding is requested specifically to enable junior faculty, postdoctorals, graduate students, and researchers from underrepresented groups to present research results in a dynamic multidisciplinary international symposium. Each of four oral sessions will feature 8-10 presentations including a keynote address plus invited and contributed papers. An evening poster session is also scheduled. A substantial group of distinguished keynote and invited speakers has already agreed to participate. During the past decade remarkable advances in protein and peptide science have led to new synthetic and discovery methodologies, new folding motifs and building block architectures, and control of peptide and protein self-assembly to create structures from the nanometer to the micrometer length scales. These advances are now poised to enable discovery and development of materials that form self-assembled hierarchical structures useful for emerging technologies in biomedicine, molecular electronics, and nanotechnology. The symposium provides a forum for international experts and beginning researchers to share recent advances.
BROADER IMPACTS: The requested funding will be used exclusively to enable younger scientists, in particular, those from underrepresented groups, to participate in this interdisciplinary symposium.
