Travel: Student Travel Support for the Doctoral Colloquium at IEEE Visualization (IEEE VIS) 2023

This is a travel grant that will support student attendees of the Doctoral Colloquium at IEEE Visualization conference (October 22-27, 2023) in Melbourne Australia. It will support conference expenses for 15 US-based Ph.D. students in visualization who are in the process of formulating their dissertation project and seek feedback at a critical stage in their graduate training. The student participants and expert panelists will be selected based on their research excellence and their contribution to the goal of promoting full participation of women and other underrepresented groups. We also strive for diversity in institution, scientific discipline, and research specialization. The event will foster student academic and professional development through three main prongs: (1) research, (2) mentorship, and (3) networking. To help students develop and finetune their research, each student will present and receive feedback on their dissertation topic from expert panelists, including senior researchers in the field who are not their doctoral advisors and from their peers. This guidance will provide a fresh perspective on their dissertation topics, help develop the intellectual contributions of their work, and help situate their work in topics of core interest to the broader visualization community. The work presented at the event reflects the state-of-the-art in visualization. To provide mentorship, each student participant will be assigned a mentor among the expert panelists. During the Doctoral Colloquium the mentor will provide detailed feedback on student’s submitted materials, offer support and encouragement for completing the dissertation research, and answer professional development questions. To foster networking opportunities, the Doctoral Colloquium will host a lunch for building social connections and a round table discussion to address student questions about career paths, job searches, grant writing, and becoming an independent researcher. Across all activities the Doctoral Colloquium will establish and strengthen professional networks and research collaborations among junior and senior researchers, which are beneficial for the junior researchers, and critical for the advancement of the field. By building this community at the beginning of the VIS conference, students can continue to network and potentially establish collaborations throughout the duration of IEEE VIS 2023. 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.