11th International Workshop on Modeling in Crystal growth (IWMCG-11) & 1st International School on Modeling in Crystal Growth (ISMCG-1); Timisoara, Romania; 22-25 September 2024

This grant provides travel support to promote the attendance of US researchers at the 11th International Workshop on Modeling in Crystal Growth (IWMCG-11) and the 1st International School on Modeling in Crystal Growth (ISMCG-1). This workshop and school will be hosted at the West University of Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania, 19-25 September 2024, and will bring together top senior and promising junior researchers of both academe and industry from the United States, Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world to identify common priorities, allow the exchange of new ideas, and foster future collaborative work.

This award will support US researchers, with priority funding of young researchers (graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and young faculty), to participate in these symposia, where they will be exposed to cutting-edge research and to the broadly-based, international community of this field. The topic of the workshop addresses an area, crystal growth, that has been identified by the National Research Council as strategically important and in need of strengthening in the U.S.

Advances in this area will impact advanced manufacturing processes that affect electronic and photonic devices for information, energy, defense, and detector systems, the production of fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and more. Improvements in these crystal-base systems will favorably impact wide-ranging domains relevant to national prosperity, defense, and health.

In addition to promoting discourse and collaboration among researchers in this area, the support of this workshop will promote an important and timely research topic. Crystal growth is itself profoundly interesting and significant, and modeling such processes, the focus of the workshop and school, is inherently interdisciplinary and demanding. From a fundamental vantage point, studying crystal growth yields important understanding of thermodynamic phase change, associated self-assembly and pattern-formation phenomena, and kinetic and transport limitations to growth.

From a technological viewpoint, a successful crystal growth process represents a quintessential advanced manufacturing system, whose successful modeling and subsequent understanding, control, and optimization are inherently challenging and valuable. NSF support will allow researchers in the US an opportunity to advance their careers through international exposure and future collaboration in this area.

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.