Conference: Symposium Support for the 2022 AIChE Annual Meeting Biomaterials Area: Broadening Participation in Biomaterials

Non-Technical Description:

This award will support a symposium at the 2022 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Annual Meeting, entitled “Biomaterials Area 8B: Broadening Participation in Biomaterials”. The event will be held November 13-18, 2022, at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. The AIChE 8B Biomaterials area serves to provide a forum for researchers from academia and industry to share recent advances on the design, synthesis, and engineering of materials that interface with live, biological elements.

This research area has applications in tissue engineering, drug delivery, wound healing, and disease modeling. This area of the AIChE Annual meeting will host approximately 120 oral and poster presentations, from a combination of graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, faculty, and industry scientists. In this context, NSF funds will support the development of a new research forum to promote excellence in biomaterials research and enhance participation of undergraduate students from minoritized groups.

The symposium will host an informal meeting at the full conference to develop future initiatives for broadening participation at all levels. These efforts align with the IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Anti-Racism, and Learning) initiative recently adopted by AIChE. Technical Description:

This award will support a symposium at the 2022 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Annual Meeting, entitled “Biomaterials Area 8B: Broadening Participation in Biomaterials,” to be November 13-18, 2022, at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. The objectives of the annual meeting are to: 1) communicate current and emerging progress in biomaterials design and properties, 2) provide a venue for biomaterials researchers to connect and exchange ideas from a chemical engineering perspective, 3) promote opportunities for graduate students and post-doctoral scholars to share their work and advance their professional goals, and 4) interface with other chemical engineering-oriented subfields to enhance the scientific depth of biomaterials research.

Research contributions include biomaterials development for controlling cell behavior, interacting with microbes, engineering nascent tissues, and controlling release of therapeutics. Relevant material platforms include hydrogels, particles, macroscopic platforms, polymers, peptides, and biomimetics. These technical areas will foster advances in biomaterials research for applications in health that serve diverse groups.

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.