This collaborative grant provides travel support to enable students to attend the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference (ISERC) that will be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 18-22 May 2013. These funds will be leveraged through matching funds and support from various universities and the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) and will go a long way in reducing the travel cost burden on students and thereby improve student participation at the conference. It is expected that 20 to 100 students will benefit from these travel funds. Students form an integral part of ISERC of the registrations at the conference. Students participate in different ways including presenting papers and posters related to graduate and undergraduate research, attending technical sessions, participating in student competitions, scholarship award functions and so on. Strong student participation at ISERC has motivated a number of students to pursue graduate school options and event academic careers. Past data has shown that student attendance drops when the conference was held outside the continental US. NSF support will help maintain high student participation in ISERC 2013.
ISERC provides an excellent opportunity for students to broaden the impact of their work. Being one of the major annual conferences in the field of IE and OR, the ISERC is a venue for US and international researchers in both academia and industry to showcase research results and exchange ideas. In conjunction with the ISERC is the Applied Solution Conference, which focuses on solutions to industrial problems. The venue of the ISERC will bring together practitioners, vendors, and researchers in all related disciplines in industry, academia, government, and other organizations. The ISERC is an excellent opportunity for the students to network with peers, potential employers, or future collaborators. Another valuable opportunity for the students is to attend the Doctoral Colloquium organized by IIE. Students will join a special panel session led by experts in the field to discuss various topics of interest, including the job search, life in academia and industry, the tenure process, teaching, research, and professional service. Students will also have an opportunity to publish their work in a high quality conference proceedings indexed by ProQuest. Since ISERC 2013 is being held in Puerto Rico, it provides a unique opportunity to increase exposure of undergraduate Hispanic students from that region to their student peers pursuing graduate and research careers in the continental USA. Through the travel grant, the IE community would be able to increase the student participation at the conference.
The objective of this project is to provide travel support to students to emable them to attend the Industrial and Systems Engineering Conference (ISERC) that was held from May 18-22 2013 in San Juan Puerto Rico. The major activities of the grant include: soliciting matching support from US IE departments, soliciting matching support from IIE, handling grant applications and making granting decisions, hosting a grantee presentation at the conference to allow NSF program managers to present the grant certificated to awardees and processing travel reimbursements. The original objective of this project was simply to support students to attend ISERC 2013. After the conference, it seems that the impact of this small travel grant has gone beyond reducing students' travel cost. It was also an incentive for students to participate in the conferences and it provided the students an opportunity to explore their professional network. Overall 42 undergraduate and graduate students from 32 US universities received the travel grant to attend the conference. The grant significantly increased the visibility of NSF at ISERC 2013.The grant allowed some bright and talented students to attend this international conference. They networked with attendees from various research areas, and shared their ideas in addition to getting an opportunity to present their research to an academic audience. All of these experiences are valuable to their career development. The grant also emphasized NSF's commitment towards training the next generation of leaders in industrial engineering.
