Conference: MCELS: Advances in Basic Research and Translational Opportunities; Hilton Head, South Carolina; 26-28 March 2025

This grant supports students and postdocs (12 Travel Awards) to attend the "MCELS: Advances in Basic Research and Translational Opportunities" scientific meeting which will take place in Hilton Head, South Carolina, 26-28 March 2025, including registration fees and travel accommodations. The grant additionally provides funding for event space rental, poster boards, and the conference website. These students join researchers from diverse backgrounds, including biology, engineering, modeling, ethics, medicine, and government, facilitating multidisciplinary projects and collaborations necessary to reach the potential of M-CELS. They will have access to invited speakers, technical talks, posters and other meetings over two days. The specific objectives of this conference are: 1) to help define the M-CELS vision, foster a collective capacity for ethical deliberation, and chart a course to realize the vision, and 2) to promote interdisciplinary collaborations and career development and networking opportunities. Multi-cellular Engineered Living Systems (M-CELS) utilize emergence arising from the behavior of integrated clusters of living cells and the interactions of groups of clusters to accomplish a goal. Engineering systems of living cells comprised of cell clusters with distinct functional units are capable of, for example, sensing, information processing, actuation, regulated protein expression, and transport. Their collective functionality can meet a wide range of critical societal needs in human health, disease modeling, and drug screening. This meeting will bring together scientists and investigators from diverse backgrounds to facilitate multidisciplinary projects and collaborations necessary to reach the potential of M-CELS. A satellite program engaging the general public will allow development of new understandings, which could be used in societal contexts. This conference will help define that vision, foster a collective capacity for ethical deliberation, and chart a course to realize the vision. The results of the meeting will be disseminated as a collection of articles in a special issue. 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.