Participant Support for MechBio Symposium 2024; Boulder, Colorado; 17-18 August 2024

This grant provides support for participant costs to attend and participate in the MechBio Symposium 2024 to be held 17-18 August 2024, at the University of Colorado Boulder, in Boulder, Colorado. This support will broaden participation by reducing costs for participation, thereby enabling active high quality scientific participation from trainees both from within the Colorado Front Range area, as well as those traveling from outside the Front Range area.

The goal of the MechBio mechanobiology meeting is to bring together investigators from the various disciplinary fields working on mechanobiology under one platform to promote dissemination of ideas and engagement across career-stages. This meeting will provide a unique opportunity to foster exchange of research ideas spanning various disciplines in engineering, computations, and biology.

The intimate thematic setting will promote engagement across career stages from early-career to established senior investigators. The meeting programming will specifically ensure opportunities for sparking new cross-disciplinary collaborations. The Colorado Front Range location will add distinct advantages, with the presence of multiple research institutions, universities, medical centers, and a booming biomedical industry presence.

The MechBio Symposium 2024 will be held as a 2-day event, featuring 5 single track scientific sessions; and dedicated programming for promoting collaboration, engaging trainees and early-career participants, and supporting their professional development in this field. The theme of the meeting will be: Enabling Convergence Across Techniques and Scales.

This theme encapsulates the essence of the science we plan to discuss - how to combine a variety of cross-disciplinary techniques (theory, experiments, imaging, computations) to understand how mechanical signals are generated, transmitted, and converted into biological signals across a range of spatial and temporal scales. The meeting will host participants from a range of disciplines – engineering, physics, mathematics, life sciences, and clinical sciences.

Participants will contribute in the form of delivering scientific talks, presenting posters etc. The conference contributions, and outcomes from the scientific discussions will be compiled in form of the conference proceedings booklet to be released openly with the broader mechanobiology and biomechanics community.

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.