Travel: International Conference on Arabidopsis Research - ICAR 2025

A crucifer plant Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as mustard weed, is a reference plant organism studied by thousands of researchers worldwide. Knowledge obtained from Arabidopsis research usually can be applied to crop species, to rationally improve agricultural traits. The community of Arabidopsis researchers operates on the principles of sharing data, resources, tools, and techniques.

The International Conferences on Arabidopsis Research (ICARs) are the main, highly effective venue for enhancing information exchange, creating new networks especially for young scientists, and establishing new collaborations. This award will support the travel of the US-based young scientists to the ICAR held in June 2025 in Ghent (Belgium). The majority of support will go to students, postdoctoral scholars, and beginning investigators.

The program includes organized activities prior, during, and following the meeting to ensure that the supported scientists have ample opportunities to network with each other, and others at the conference, and to that their professional objectives are met. Altogether this travel award will support a sustainable pipeline of skilled scientists for the U.S. bioeconomy.

A key factor in the synergistic interactions among Arabidopsis research labs has been the opportunity to meet and share research with colleagues from around the world. ICAR 2025 will cover a broad range of important and current topics in 21 platform talks by scientific leaders in sessions on genetics and genomics, genome editing, and quantitative biology.

The program includes 26 community-proposed sessions on diverse topics such as predictive modeling to understand genotype-phenotype relationships, epigenetics, RNA modifications, quantitative imaging, omics approaches, single cell biology, gene editing, and biological discovery using artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive modeling. Early career researchers will be emphasized for oral presentations selections.

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.