The Melosh Medal Symposium is an internationally recognized graduate student-paper competition in finite-element analysis that is currently in its twenty-second year. A distinguished panel of judges selects the finalists that compete in the event, through a double-blind format. The objectives of this project are to increase access to the Symposium as well as its visibility for a much broader set of participants than in previous years. This will be effected by providing travel assistance to all participants, including the finalists, the judges, and additional students identified as honorable mentions through the review process. In anticipation of this assistance opening up the applicant pool to a much broader class of students, promotional flyers will be sent to engineering programs at historically black colleges and universities. A call for papers will also be placed on the web at iMechanica, with particular emphasis placed on the availability of travel support. The winner will be selected on the basis of a combined paper/oral presentation score, and the results of the Symposium will be widely disseminated on the web and local news media.
The benefits of this project are largely educational in nature. The Melosh Symposium is the only competition of its kind in the area of computational mechanics. It provides a unique opportunity for top graduate students in engineering to interact with leading scholars in their field, and is completely separate from any technical conferences.
