Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for the 2022 International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation (IWBDA)

The 14th International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation (IWBDA) 2022 takes place in Paris France from October 24th to October 26th and will bring together researchers from electronic design automation (the practice of using computer software to build complex electronics) and synthetic biology (the forward design of novel biological systems using engineering principles). The goal of IWBDA is to make biology more easily, robustly, reliably, and predictably engineered and, therefore, tackle challenges in biology and medicine, leading to advances in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention. This award provides travel assistance for ten undergraduate and graduate students to attend this workshop to present research, participate in a computer programming competition, and network with a large community of industrial and academic researchers. These participants will go on to form the foundation of the field in the future. Specifically, these students will join a wide variety of researchers (120+) from electronic design automation and synthetic biology in a unique context that does not exist elsewhere. They will have access to between twelve and fifteen technical talks over two days, two invited lectures, ten to twenty posters, multiple group discussion sessions, and a featured student programming competition (BDAthlon). This award covers the registration for the workshop as well as partial support for travel and housing. 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.