IREE 2008 Grantees Conference being held: May 2-3, 2008 in the Washington, DC area

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Purdue University has proposed to organize the 2008 International Research and Education in Engineering (IREE) Conference in the Washington, DC area. The dates are May 2-3, 2008. The venue is not given in the proposal but in a separate e-mail, Dr. Yating Chang, an associate of the PI, has indicated that Hotel Hyatt Dulles will be the chosen venue; see her e-mail attached. The IREE conference will be attended by early-career faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows funded by the IREE Program in 2007. The IREE Program was initiated by ENG/EEC in 2006 to provide supplemental funding to current awardees in existing divisions in the Directorate for Engineering. The goal of IREE is to enable early-career researchers in the U.S. to gain international research experience and perspective. Additionally, by broadening existing research projects funded by programs in ENG through partnership with self-supported foreign counterparts, IREE seeks to enhance U.S. innovation in both research and education. In the 3-day conference held in 2007, IREE grantees funded in FY2006 explored international research collaborations and the impact that an international research experience may have on the quality of their research as well as on the technical competency of the researchers. Most, if not all, conference attendees support the idea of international collaborations, and agree that such collaborations have positive impact both on their research and on their educational journey to being global engineers.One of the recommendations that came out of the 2007 conference was to use the next conference to feed-forward best practices to future grantees. The 2006 grantees, the participants of the 2007 conference, felt that they had attacked a number of problems, technical, logistical, and interpersonal, and that they had much to share. They recommended that a more formal orientation program be offered to IREE participants before they travel abroad for the research assignment. They also recommended that the time for the conference be reduced to 1.5-2 days to overlap a weekend. The current proposal concerns the 2008 conference for the grantees funded in FY2007, and is responsive to the recommendations by participants of the 2007 conference. The PI of this proposal, Professor Dan Hirleman, is a highly regarded teacher and researcher. He is the Head of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue, and is the Interim Director of Purdue's Global Engineering Program.