The objective of this award is to support the travel and registration expenses of student and postdoctoral researchers to the International Conference on Nanoscience and Technology (ICN+T 2008) to be held in Keystone, Colorado from July 20-25, 2008. This major international meeting provides a singular forum for discussion of the recent advances in scanning probe and related techniques and the latest developments in nanoscale science and technology. The ICN+T combines two former longstanding (since the 1980s), and highly successful international meetings - the International conference on Scanning Tunneling Microscopy/Spectroscopy and Related Techniques (STM) and Nano - into a single meeting. The first combined meeting was held in Basel, Switzerland in 2006 with over 1500 international participants. ICN+T 2008 will be held in the USA, giving USA scientists and students a chance to interact with leading nanoscientists from all over the world. The requested support is critical to assuring a high level of student participation.
As pointed out in the 2007 revised NNI Strategic Plan, there are several applications where the nanoscale will provide important innovations medicine/health, environmental remediation and sensing, safe/affordable water, continued improvements in information devices, and increased energy efficiency/security. The transition from laboratory discovery to those technologies will be accelerated by the availability of improved measurement/manipulation tools. Further those tools will provide the basis for the standards/metrology needed by industry to manufacture quality technological devices. This conference has an effective marriage between instrument developers and those who use those instruments for state-of-art investigations. The conference will provide the US research community especially its younger members with the opportunity to establish personal relationships with the researchers in instrumentation from around the world. In addition, the proceedings will be published in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology.
