2024 Gordon Research Conference on Tribology: At the Nexus of Science, Engineering, and Sustainability; Lewiston, Maine; 22-28 June 2024

This grant will provide partial support of registration fees for 5 invited participants and approximately 21 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and/or early career investigators to attend the 2024 Gordon Research Conference on Tribology: At the Nexus of Science, Engineering, and Sustainability being held in Lewiston, Maine, 22-28 June 2024. Tribology is the science of friction and wear at the sliding contacts.

Research and engineering efforts in tribology address the physical and chemical mechanisms underlying friction and wear and aim to design materials, processes, and devices such that new solutions to technological challenges become available. Advances in tribology help to reduce energy consumption by lowering friction, to prolong the lifetime, and enhance the safety of mechanical systems by reducing wear, and to decrease harmful emissions in applications from vehicles to manufacturing through the reduction of energy use.

Tribology also impacts the life of humans and animals that move on earth. The Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Tribology is a forum to exchange results of cutting-edge research amongst an interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers who are at the forefront of addressing fundamental and applied challenges in this field. This award will promote the participation of students and early-career researchers from diverse backgrounds at the GRC.

This subtitle, “At the Nexus of Science, Engineering, and Sustainability,” reflects the fact that a comprehensive understanding of tribological phenomena requires multidisciplinary knowledge encompassing a range of classical fields in science and engineering; the next significant breakthroughs are likely to be found at the nexus between disciplines. Most tribologists are trained in one of these fields with an emphasis on either science or engineering and then exposed to other fields as they make transitions from schools to real-world situations.

Realizing the multidisciplinary and multiscale challenges in tribology, the next significant breakthroughs are likely to be found at the nexus between disciplines. To achieve these breakthroughs, the very diverse tribology community needs to come together to learn and discover together. Therefore, the 2024 GRC on Tribology invites scientists and engineers from all disciplines to discuss and debate the forefront research questions in the field, and to share how these questions are addressed from different angles.

The exchange of results and ideas is held in an informal atmosphere, starting from invited talks given by leading scientists and continuing in extended discussions around contributed posters. The scientific discussion of interplays among various mechanisms over different length scales is expected to lead to breakthroughs in the understanding of the interfacial phenomena leading to friction and wear. The 2024 GRC will provide a venue for this discussion and learning.

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.