Conference: Travel for Campus Champions to PEARC23/SC23 Conference

The Campus Champions foster a dynamic and connected community of advanced research computing professionals that promote leading practices at the frontiers of research, scholarship, teaching, and industry application. Over the past 14 years, the Campus Champions program has grown to over 784 Champions at over 350 research institutions. As NSF's advanced cyberinfrastructure coordination ecosystem of services and support (ACCESS-CI.org) continues to expand, Campus Champions serve vital collaborative roles improving democratization of the ecosystem by reaching prospective users from communities who have are new to ecosystem capabilities and user support services. Two-hour community events will be conducted at Supercomputing23 and PEARC23 with dual purposes. First, Campus Champions will reflect on how to contribute and sustain activities in the ACCESS era. Second, existing, new and prospective Champions will tailor the program toward broader audiences. This will avail new and existing Campus Champions opportunities to connect in person and with the community, through discussion and social interaction. These events will enable bi-directional learning between the Campus Champions and the ACCESS program resources and outreach plans. People who are not Champions will be introduced to the community and learn practices to best support researchers at their institutions (if they support infrastructure) or to best utilize infrastructure (if they support researchers). Five candidates to receive travel funds to support participation in the events will be selected from under-resourced, non-R1 institutions based on their new (within the last 5 years) roles as non-traditional users or from an underrepresented category of Campus Champions. 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.