Student travel support for BIRS workshop on programming with chemical reaction networks

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Broader significance and importance. This is a proposal requesting $5,000 for student travel support for the Programming with Chemical Reaction Networks, workshop to be held at the Banff International Research Station (BIRS). The primary purpose of the proposal is to give travel assistance to students who will participate in this workshop. Their participation will include oral presentations and collaborative research with experts on topics related to the programming and implementation of chemical reaction networks. Approximately 7 students and postdocs, from US institutions, will be funded for travel, with an expected average award of $720 per recipient. By funding travel to students and postdocs, we are actively encouraging and incentivizing a new generation of researchers to contribute to the study of chemical reaction networks. The travel awards will foster the creation of the next generation of molecular programmers, by encouraging students to attend and interact with others in the field. In the long term, this has clear benefits for the field as a whole. Unlike a conference, where the majority of the time is devoted to formal, prepared talks, the majority of the workshop will be interactive, encouraging communication and participation of all attendees. Because there will be only twenty attendees, active participation from students and postdocs will be not only encouraged but expected. Furthermore, the informal nature of the discussions will allow younger researchers to witness research in its earliest stages, before concrete problems have even been formulated, teaching them by example the creative process of research. Finally, the organizers have made an explicit effort to invite women and under-represented minorities to the workshop.Technical description. The study of chemical reaction networks dates back 150 years, when Guldberg and Waage first formulated the Law of Mass Action. The 1970s saw a surge of interest from the mathematical community, particularly the foundational work of Horn, Jackson, and Feinberg in characterizing subclasses of networks with guarantees on the existence and/or uniqueness of steady states. A more recent mathematical community has arisen, also studying chemical reaction networks as formal mathematical objects, but concerned principally with understanding their ability to carry out computation. Although theoretical in nature, this line of research is informed directly by recent experimental endeavors in programming the behavior of matter at the molecular level, using DNA, enzymes, and other biochemical molecules as engineering tools re-purposed from their biological function to serve as computational primitives. The intention of this workshop is to bring together experts in different aspects of chemical reaction networks, from the computational perspective studying the abilities and limitations of engineered chemical systems, the mathematical analysis of natural chemical systems, and experimentalists who deal with real chemicals. Our goals are to help these different communities learn the main results, techniques, and perspectives of each other, to identify unifying conceptual principles that underlie the different projects, and to generate novel research directions for the future based on this interdisciplinary interaction.