Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for the 2025 Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems Summer Research Institute (CSST 2025)

This award will support 11 PhD students attending the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST) Summer Research Institute. Many of humanity's most pressing problems require research teams that can bring together both social and technical expertise. For instance, improving cybersecurity and privacy requires deep technical knowledge of encryption and trust models, as well as philosophical and anthropological understandings of values like safety and autonomy.

The researchers, data scientists, and designers who will solve these "socio-technical" problems need need training in interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration. However, researchers who span boundaries too often are trained at the margins of their fields and lack models of success, mentorship, or support in their home institutions and fields. The CSST Summer Research Institute provides this support by bringing together senior Ph.D. students, post-docs, industry researchers, and early career faculty with experienced boundary-spanning researchers, providing a critical intellectual and professional support system that enables boundary-spanning researchers to succeed in both their careers and the social problems they tackle.

The central function of the institute is to sustain and develop a densely connected research community of scholars. An initial cohort of approximately 10 mentors are recruited each fall, with additional mentors recruited as needed to support the particular needs of mentees in the spring. The call for participants is released in early spring each year.

Approximately 30 participants (senior Ph.D. students, post-docs, industry researchers, and early career faculty) are chosen by a review committee comprised of mentors, organizers, and other senior reviewers as necessary to conduct a well-informed review of the submissions; these reviewers will make their decisions based on materials submitted by applicants in response to the Call for Participation. Disciplinary, methodological, institutional, and topical breath will all be considered in final acceptance decisions.

Participants will be invited to join informal social activities outside of the institute's formal sessions and participate in a Slack workspace intended to support cohort and community beyond the conclusion of the in-person event.

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.