Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for 2021 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM)

Bioinformatics and Biomedicine research requires close collaboration among multi-disciplinary researchers from quantitative sciences, life sciences, and their interfaces. The research is essential to the understanding of complex biological systems, which impacts the science and technology of fields ranging from agricultural and environmental sciences to pharmaceutical and medical sciences.

The IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine 2021(BIBM-2021) will provide an open and interactive forum to promote multidisciplinary research and education in Bioinformatics and Biomedicine, facilitate cross-fertilization of ideas, and bridge knowledge gaps. The scientific program will cover six synergistic themes on i) Bioinformatics and Computational Biology of Molecular Structure, Function, and Evolution; ii) Computational Systems Biology; and iii) Next-Generation Sequencing and High-throughput Methods, which are all relevant to NSF research areas.

A special panel, the Bioinformatics Educational Workshop, will foster discussion on education opportunities and barriers. As an effort to engage young researchers, especially students from underrepresented groups, BIBM-2021 plans to involve them in the meeting organization and will include mentoring activities in the conference program. The conference travel grant aims to provide the crucial funding needed to support the participation of early-career researchers and graduate students, especially those from underrepresented groups, as a training opportunity for the next generation of scientists, thereby, broadening the scientific impact of this international conference.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.