Symposium on Biological & BioInspired Materials Assembly

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): NIH support is requested to defray participant costs for a special Materials Research Society (MRS) symposium entitled, "Biological and Bio-inspired Materials Assembly," which will focus on the cutting edge of research on novel biomaterials based on DNA, protein, and lipid assemblies. This 3-day symposium will be held in Boston, MA as part of the 2003 Fall Meeting of the Materials Research Society. The panel of invited speakers is highly interdisciplinary and includes a wide array of academic scientists (Angela Belcher, Materials Science & Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; William DeGrado, Biochemistry & Biophysics, University of Pennsylvania; David Lynn, Chemistry, Emory University; Phillip Messersmith, Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University; Martin Moller, Biochemistry, RWTH; Christof Niemeyer, Biochemistry, University of Dortmund; Nadrian Seeman, Chemistry, New York University; Samuel I. Stupp, Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, and Medicine, Northwestern University; Gregory Tew, Polymer Science & Engineering, University of Massachusetts; Matthew Tirrell, Chemical Engineering, University of California at Santa Barbara; Ulrich Wiesner, Materials Science & Engineering, Cornell University; Shuguang Zhang, Center for Biomedical Engineering, MIT). 12-14 other talks will be chosen from submitted abstracts. The invited speakers include 7 bioengineers and 5 biochemists and chemists, all of whom direct research focused on the development of biomimetic systems for self-assembly of biological and non-biological systems. The goal of this symposium is not only to educate the broader materials research community about the importance and potential of biomaterials research, but also to bring together the materials scientists, who might have attended this meeting anyway, with biochemists, chemical engineers, and chemists, who would have been unlikely to attend. This symposium, and the planned conference dinner associated with it (for the speakers), will promote idea exchange and interdisciplinary collaboration. One speaker is female, reflective of the generally low female representation in this field at the principal investigator level. One of the three organizers is also female. Given the "star quality" of many of the speakers and the diversity of MRS meeting attendees, it is hoped that attendance at the symposium will be high and that the symposium will attract more women and under-represented minority scientists to the field.