Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for 2024 Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference (GLBIO)

The Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference (GLBIO) is organized by the GLBIO Consortium, which strives to enhance educational opportunities and research infrastructure throughout the Great Lakes region to make the region a world leader in bioinformatics (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Quebec, and Ontario). An important goal of this annual meeting is to foster long-term, collaborative relationships among computational and life science researchers and educators from academia, government, and industry, spanning the Great Lakes region. Over half of the GLBIO attendees have been students, including undergraduate and high school students and over a third of the attendees have been women. This award will offer travel support for 20 student participants who attend US universities or are US citizens, with special focus on encouraging diversity among the supported students. With the meeting being held at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a well populated region of the US, it will attract a large and diverse US-based (or US citizen) student population. This meeting is not only for experts in bioinformatics, but also for people who make substantial use of bioinformatics tools in their work or would like to expand their use of these tools for complex biological problems. Students funded by this award are expected to get the following out of attending this conference: exposure to state-of-the-art scientific and educational program, opportunity to present their work, networking with peers and other members of their community, both professionally and socially, and participation in recruiting roundtable events with universities to learn about their programs and open positions, or with industry partners to look for jobs. 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.