Conference: DGRAV Student Travel Award for the 2025 Joint March Meeting and April Meeting: APS Global Physics Summit

This award provides travel support for early-career researchers to attend the 2025 American Physical Society (APS) Joint March Meeting and April Meeting: APS Global Physics Summit in Anaheim CA. This award will increase the participation of early career researchers who might not have otherwise been able to attend the annual APS meeting, which will be made more vibrant by having the graduate and advanced undergraduate students present work at the cutting edge of their areas of research. Supporting the attendance of advanced undergraduate and graduate students will promote the professional development of these early career researchers, growing STEM fields and creating a future generation of gravitational physicists. The April APS Meeting is the premier scientific meeting attended by gravitational physicists in North America. At these meetings, the Division of Gravitational Physics (DGRAV) typically sponsors approximately 10 invited and 30 contributed sessions and receives more than 200 submitted abstracts. Hundreds of gravitational physicists of all disciplines and levels of professional careers engage with each other at these meetings. This award will supplement traditional travel support for these annual meetings provided by DGRAV since 1999. Supporting early career researchers, particularly those coming from institutions where travel funding is scarce, will allow them to attend this important but pricey meeting. Students will be able to attend networking events such as graduate school fairs, and career fairs, and make contacts with professional physicists in industry, academia, and national labs. Participants will gain highly transferable knowledge they will surely find valuable in whatever career path best suits them. 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.