Travel support for the IMS-ISBA international conference

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The principal investigator requested support for the Second international Joint Meeting of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) and ISBA (the International Society for Bayesian Analysis), to be held in Bormio, Italy on Wednesday, January 12 to Friday, January 14, 2005. A central theme of the conference will be Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and related methods and applications in the 15 years since the publication of Gelfand and Smith (1990, JASA), the paper that introduced these methods to mainstream statisticians. The requested funding is to support the travel expenses of junior statistical investigators from US institutions, i.e., persons pursuing a PhD or DrPH in statistics or a closely related field, or who have received such a degree within the five years preceding the conference. Such investigators are often doing research that is among the most novel, interesting, and important for international dissemination, yet lack the travel funds necessary to attend such a conference, since they have not yet established a publication track record sufficient to attract external travel and other funding for their work.The benefit of and need for attendance at such meetings by junior statistical researchers is particularly great, since they contribute mightily to their professional development and help ``level the playing field'' with more established senior investigators. The specific anticipated benefits from the conference are: to provide an opportunity for researchers to discuss an area in some depth, by allowing ample time for presentations on a specific subject; to motivate young researchers to conduct research in the conference's focus areas that provide ample opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration; to encourage young researchers and students to present their work, interact with senior colleagues, and make contact with their peers in a friendly, small meeting environment; to include a large portion of researchers and students from underrepresented groups among participants, and provide the opportunity for one-on-one discussions with colleagues from other institutions; to disseminate materials from the meeting as widely as possible, by posting the presentations on the ISBA web site at www.bayesian.org.