This international travel award to Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) provides support that will enable a diverse group of approximately twenty-five U.S. graduate students to attend the annual meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany. Since 1951, Nobel Prize winners and students in chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine have met annually in Lindau, Germany. Each year an international group of some 600 students is invited to attend the weeklong meeting. The program includes formal lectures in the mornings and the remainder of each day is set aside for the students to meet informally with the Nobel Laureate scientists, as well as with their fellow students from around the world. The programmatic cycle revolves among the three Nobel themes noted above, followed by a multidisciplinary theme every fourth year that embraces all three of these Nobel focus areas. Together with another approximately thirty-five-member cohort supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, (DOE), the National institutes of Health (NIH), ORAU, and private foundations, this grant brings to seventy the number of graduate students in the U.S. delegation that will participate in these meetings. The objective of this program is to motivate participating U.S. students toward excellence in their chosen careers through their exposure to and interaction with Nobel Laureates and fellow students from around the world.
Broader impacts of this international travel activity and NSF support of it by the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and include the likely synergistic impact on the participating students' scientific career development, the potential for initiating career-long international scientific interactions, and the opportunity to promote diversity at multiple levels among the student participants.
