This project provides support for U.S. undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty to participate in the Transatlantic Joint Conference of the Society for Mathematical Biology and the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology. The conference is being held in Kraków, Poland, June 28 - July 2, 2011. The meeting is a forum for established researchers to discuss and highlight existing gaps in the state of the art and for junior faculty and students to delineate areas where they can make successful contributions in the future. The conference also promotes collaboration and development of both experimental and theoretical studies of biological systems and to expose undergraduate and graduate student, postdoctoral researchers and junior faculty to problems in mathematical and computational biology. This joint transatlantic conference also encourages scientific exchange and collaboration between mathematical biologists in the U.S.A. and Europe.
The conference is organized specifically to provide interactions between senior researchers, junior faculty, and graduate students. The poster session plays a key role in facilitating such interaction. In addition, the conference has a mentoring scheme that aims to improve the educational and professional experience of scientists at the conference by introducing junior and senior scientists with similar research interests. Travel Conference awardees participate in the conference mentoring program where they have a unique opportunity to learn how scientific research and academic professional growth occurs in Europe.
For this project, we requested funding for U.S. undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty to participate in the Transatlantic Joint Conference of the Society for Mathematical Biology and the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology. The conference was held in Kraków, Poland, June 28 - July 2, 2011. The objectives of the joint conference were to: To explore and present the development of new experimental and theoretical approaches for the purposes of investigating biological systems. To promote interaction between mathematicians, biologists, physicists, engineers, chemists, and members of other groups with interests in all aspects of complex biological systems. To provide a forum for junior faculty and graduate students to interact with a wide range of experts. To suggest new problems for modeling and experimentation. To attract new researchers to the field. To encourage scientific exchange and collaboration between mathematical biologists in the U.S.A. and Europe. This was the second joint meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology and the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology. The intellectual merit of our proposal was to provide a forum for established researchers to discuss and highlight existing gaps in current research and for junior faculty and students to delineate areas where they can make successful contributions in the future. To encourage participation by U.S. undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and junior faculty, we sponsored a travel conference award program with this award. A public call for travel award applications was made through the Society Mathematical Biology mailing list, conference website and other venues. After a careful selection process, a total of 30 applicants were chosen to receive travel grants: 2 undergraduate students, 6 graduate students, 13 postdoctoral fellows, 8 junior faculty and 1 medical resident fellow. The recipient demographics were 60% females and 40% male, and 13% are members of an ethnic group underrepresented in the natural sciences (3 Hispanic/Latinos and 1 Black/African American). The broader impact of the joint conference was to promote collaboration and development of both experimental and theoretical studies of biological systems and to expose undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior faculty to problems in mathematical and computational biology. The conference was organized specifically to provide mentorship interactions between senior researchers, junior faculty, and graduate students with similar research interests. The poster session facilitated such interactions. Travel conference awardees participated in the conference mentoring program where they had the unique opportunity to learn how scientific research and academic professional growth occurs in Europe. One page summaries of each presentation at the conference was compiled into conference booklet, which is available electronically on the conference website: www.impan.pl/~ecmtb11/index.php?file=main.html
