Travel Support for 2024 Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Annual Conference and Expo; Montreal, Canada; 18-21 May 2024

This grant provides support for students to participate in the 2024 Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Annual Conference and Expo to be held 18-21 May 2024, in Montreal, Canada. The IISE Conference and Expo is a unique venue for advancing discovery and understanding systems-level thinking in manufacturing. The 2024 IISE Annual Conference offers 1120 oral research presentations on topics across the Industrial and Systems Engineering research spectrum. Of those, the manufacturing systems’ most closely related divisions, Manufacturing & Design and Quality Control and Reliability Engineering, offer 195 oral presentations and access to 80 accepted papers for publication in the conference proceedings. These presentations cover state-of-the-art research in manufacturing topics such as Additive and Hybrid Manufacturing, Digital Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing, Bioprinting and Healthcare Manufacturing, and Manufacturing Cybersecurity. The conference’s location in Montreal presents a barrier, as some students will not have sufficient funds from their institutions or advisors to attend. By reducing the financial barrier for attending the conference, this award will help more students to benefit from attending the conference, helping to make the conference more accessible to a more diverse range of students. The award will support the recruitment and education of graduate and undergraduate students to engage in manufacturing systems integration research, contributing directly to broadening participation, training, and strengthening the U.S. manufacturing workforce development. This grant will support students' conference registration and travel costs with the goal of promoting student participation at the conference, especially among students from groups often underrepresented in engineering. The selection process of the awardees will prioritize students who do not otherwise have sufficient funds from other sources (e.g., advisor, department, other travel awards) to attend the conference. Through this award, a special professional development plan will be developed for students to ensure they benefit from their participation in the conference. The main objectives of this plan are to: 1) expose more students as future workforce for Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, 2) support researchers to learn more about funding opportunities in this field, 3) support students as future faculty through networking and facilitating new collaborations, 4) expand participation in IISE to include a broader audience, and 5) promote diversity and inclusion in manufacturing and design. 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.