Travel Support for Early Career Faculty and Students to Attend the 2025 REMADE Institute Circular Economy Conference; Washington, DC; 10-11 April 2025

This award provides travel support for students, post-docs and young faculty to attend and participate in the REMADE Institute Circular Economy Conference. The REMADE Institute’s goal is to develop technologies to reuse, remanufacture, and recycle energy-intensive materials. REMADE’s mission is to foster manufacturing technologies that reduce embodied energy and decrease emissions.

This conference aims to provide a forum to share leading-edge research on technologies that accelerate the US's transition to a Circular Economy. The conference offers participants an opportunity to showcase their scientific accomplishments, interact with peers and colleagues from academia, government labs, and industry, extend their network, and foster new collaborations within the broader advanced manufacturing and environmental sustainability communities.

The conference benefits the nation by educating and training a skilled workforce better prepared to provide transformative solutions to overcome challenges in their chosen fields. The conference meets the national priorities of advanced manufacturing, environmental sustainability and economic prosperity. This conference is supported by CMMI’s Advanced Manufacturing and CBET’s Environmental Sustainability programs.

The REMADE Institute anticipates conference attendance will benefit student and young faculty professional, scientific and technical development. The conference’s goal is to integrate materials lifecycle stages of design, manufacturing, remanufacturing, and recycling with system-level perspectives designed to identify crosscutting research collaboration opportunities.

These understandings are critical to the achievement of a circular economy. The conference includes talks by leading domestic and international speakers, who discuss their latest research on topics such as regenerative economy, recovery/recycling/remanufacturing technologies, role of circular economy in a resource-constrained world, industrial ecology, overcoming supply chain challenges, net zero emissions in manufacturing, industrial decarbonization, technologies for transforming materials recovery facilities, and others.

Additionally, the conference enables students and young faculty to enhance their communication skills through oral and poster presentations and in-depth discussions of their research work with their peers. This interactive experience significantly enhances the education and training of students and young faculty, increases their enthusiasm for the research topic, acquaints them with expectations for scientific careers, and exposes them to new approaches and opportunities for innovative research.

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.