Conference: Support for U.S. Participants at the 18th International Congress on Catalysis

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The project will provide support for graduate student participation in the 18th International Congress on Catalysis (ICC) to be held in Lyon, France, July 14-19, 2024. Specifically, the funding will partially cover registration and travel expenses of approximately 20 U.S. academic Ph.D and postdoctoral students to attend the Congress and facilitate their interactions with the international catalysis community. The critical importance of catalysis is reflected by the fact that 25-30% of all manufactured goods in the United States involve catalysis in their process chemistry. The students will present their research at the conference, attend lectures by leaders in the field, and interact with fellow students from around the world. Proceedings of the ICC will be published openly on the web and will constitute a significant part of the archival literature on catalysis.The ICC meeting is the largest global meeting dedicated to catalysis, and is held once every four years. The Congress was last held in the United States in 1996. The goal of the 18th ICC is to provide a vision for future catalysis research as guided by the past but focused on challenges that lie ahead. The program will highlight recent developments, challenges, and opportunities in the context of critical shifts from fossil-fuel based energy and feedstocks to sustainable energy and renewable feedstocks as needed to address carbon emissions and related climate impacts. To that end, explosive developments are occurring in the field related to analytical tools, catalyst synthesis, experimental techniques, computational methods spanning molecular to process scales, and advances in data science. The scientific program will include plenary and keynote lectures, invited and contributed papers, and poster presentations covering all of those aspects. Furthermore, the International Congress is a rare opportunity for U.S. students to interact with fellow students and premier researchers from across the world at the most prestigious conference the catalysis community has to offer. This will significantly assist with maintaining U.S. research competitiveness, while also inspiring students to tackle grand challenges related to catalytic processes. Catalysis is an enabling technology for a broad range of scientific and engineering impact areas related to environmental pollution control, sustainability, energy, and net-zero-carbon chemical manufacturing. Student training and engagement in these areas ensures a future cohort of catalytic researchers well-positioned to make continued advances to science and engineering that will serve the needs of the Nation and the global community for years to come.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.