4th International Conference on Packing Problems

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This award will support the 4th International Conference on Packing Problems that will be held at Yale University June 3-7, 2019. The 4th International Conference on Packing Problems will feature 37 invited speakers (with 40-minute talks) from the U.S., Europe, India, China, Japan, and Australia, and at least 10 contributed 20-minute talks from junior scientists. The topics of the Conference will include packing and flows in granular media, jamming and glass transitions in metal alloys, colloids, gels, droplets, foams, and emulsions, tissue morphogenesis, cell packing in tumors, and dense packing in proteins. In contrast to the previous three Conferences, the 4th International Conference on Packing Problems will have a significant focus on jamming and glass transitions in biological materials. The Conference on Packing Problems will offer at least 10 contributed speaking slots for junior researchers to give 20-minute talks and two 90-minute poster sessions, which will allow the junior researchers to introduce their work and receive feedback on their work from the international research community. The Conference will advertise to undergraduates, Ph.D. students, and postdocs at the universities of the invited speakers and through newsletters of several Units (DBIO, DCMP, GSOFT, and GSNP) of the American Physical Society. To encourage attendance by URM undergraduates and Ph.D. students, the PI will offer 5 travel grants for URM students.How the structural and mechanical properties of systems near jamming are affected by particle shape, deformability, and friction needs further research. In addition, more recent work has identified jamming like transitions that occur in developing tissues, cancer tumors, the bacterial cytoplasm, and protein cores. The 4th International Conference on Packing Problems will bring together experts in jamming and glass transitions and packing problems and allow them to interact with the leading experimentalists in soft matter and biological physics to determine whether concepts from ja mming and glass transitions can be used to explain important open questions in their research areas.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.