Graduate Student Conference in Probability

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This is a proposal for participant travel support for the Annual Graduate Student Probability Conference for the years 2009 and 2010. In 2007, a group of graduate students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UW) - with assistance from Professor Thomas Kurtz organized the first Graduate Student Probability Conference. This conference provided students and postdoctoral fellows from across the country with the opportunity to interact withtheir peers and learn about exciting new directions of research in Probability from some ofthe leaders in the field. After a successful debut with roughly 30 participants, the conference was again held at UW in 2008 growing to about 75 attendees. The third and fourth conferences in this series will be held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)in May 2009 and 2010 respectively. The conferences will be co-hosted by graduate students in the Department of Mathematics at Duke University and the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at UNC. Although graduate students are fully in charge of all aspects of organization - including the writing of this proposal- Professors Jonathan Mattingly (DukeU.) and Amarjit Budhiraja (UNC) will act as faculty advisors for this effort. The project has received partial support through the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI).The third conference in the series will be held May 1 { May 3, 2009. Over the three days of the conference, participants { which will primarily be graduate students and postdocs will have the opportunity to deliver and attend talks on a variety of topics in Probability.In addition to student and postdoc speakers, there will be three keynote speakers that willsurvey recent developments and future directions in their area of expertise. These speakers will be established leaders in the field and will collectively represent a broad range of topicsin the theory and applications of Probability and Stochastic Processes. Professor DavidAldous (UC Berkeley) has accepted the invitation as one of the keynote speakers for the 2009 conference.It is anticipated that each conference will be attended by approximately eighty graduate students and postdocs. NSF support will enable partial travel reimbursements of up to $300 per participant for up to thirty participants, per year. NSF funds will also be used to cover travel and other local expenses of the three keynote speakers. SAMSI support will enable travel reimbursements for up to additional twenty graduate student participants.