Travel: Student Travel Support Program for the 65th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control

This award will support students enrolled at institutions of higher education in the United States to attend and participate in the 65th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, December 15–18, 2026. The CDC is the premier international conference for researchers and practitioners working in systems, control, decision-making, and automation. For more than six decades, it has served as a central venue for disseminating advances in control theory, systems science, and engineering applications. The 2026 conference will include contributed and invited paper sessions, tutorial sessions, plenary and semi-plenary lectures, and technical workshops held immediately before the main conference. Consistent with prior years, CDC 2026 is expected to attract a large international audience, including a substantial number of graduate students and early-career researchers. This proposal seeks continued NSF support for the CDC student travel award program, which helps reduce financial barriers to participation and enables promising students to present their research, engage with the technical community, and become more fully integrated into the IEEE Control Systems Society. The scientific scope reflects the breadth and societal importance of systems and control. Research presented at the conference addresses foundational theory as well as applications in autonomous systems, robotics, transportation, energy systems, communication networks, cyber-physical infrastructure, biological systems, security, resilience, optimization, and learning-enabled decision-making. These areas are increasingly central to national priorities that depend on reliable, efficient, and secure engineered systems. Student participation in the CDC provides important benefits beyond paper presentation: students gain exposure to cutting-edge research, receive feedback from international experts, develop professional networks, and learn about emerging directions in the field. CDC 2026 will also include student-focused and early-career activities, including student travel and workshop support, the Meet the Faculty Candidates Poster Session, and recognition opportunities such as the Best Student Paper Award. By supporting student attendance, this program strengthens the U.S. research pipeline in systems and control, broadens access to a leading international technical forum, and contributes to the preparation of the next generation of researchers and engineers who will advance technologies critical to energy, transportation, defense, manufacturing, infrastructure, and other areas of national need. 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.