Grant Proposal to Support Student Travel to the Combined 2021 IEEE Pulsed Power Conference (PPC) and Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE)
Abstract
Approved for Public Release. The IEEE Pulsed Power Conference (PPC) and the IEEE Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE) are going to be co-located at the Denver Downtown Sheraton hotel in Denver, Colorado on December 12 16, 2021. Both conferences are financially and technically sponsored by the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society (NPSS) and this is the second time they have been co-located, the first being in 2015 in Austin, Texas. The expected attendance of the co-located conferences in the new COVID reality is ~450 attendees. The 3.5 day PPC is a bi-annual conference that provides a forum for the exchange and dissemination of technical information on pulsed power technology and engineering. Topics covered in at the PPC range from power electronics and their use in novel prime power and system topologies to energetic beams, high energy density plasmas, and high-power microwave sources and their applications, to low temperature plasmas for industrial and medical applications. SOFE is a biennial event that is organized and sponsored by the Fusion Technology Standing Committee of the IEEE NPSS. The conference focuses in technical areas including fusion developmentin both large R&D experimental fusion reactor facilities and basic research in fusion concepts, systems, components and materials. These developing technologies are of direct interest to Academia, industry and government labs, as well as NSF, DOE, DOD, NIH and many other agencies. The funds requested from this grant will be used only to support costs related to student participation at the conference. There is presently a shortage of college graduates, who are US citizens, ready to fill available jobs in the fields of pulsed power and fusion engineering. Most of the available jobs in these fields are offered by US DoD and DoE laboratories or their contractors. It is critical that we encourage the next generation of students to enter these challenging fields and that we provide them with the opportunity to attend conferences that will better educate them on the present state and future directions of these fields. This proposal requests $15k to support student participation at the conference. The funds will be used to support their registration fee and two nights of hotel accommodations. We estimate that a minimum of 20 students will benefit from the grant, possibly moreif we can encourage room sharing from the same organization. We will give preference to students who are US citizens when choosing the students receiving the grants. Upon conclusion of the conference, a final report will be delivered to ONR that contains details of the conference including number of attendees, participation by country, summary of the topics presented that are of especial interest to ONR and the names of the students awarded a travel grant along with the name of their institution and their paper title. Thestudents will be sent a survey upon their return home that questions them about the conference and what they gained from it. We will also ask them their graduation plans and try to connect them with DoD or DoE lab personnel who may be interested in recruiting them upon graduation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 05, 2021
- Source ID
- N000142112588
Entities
People
- David A. Wetz
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Texas at Arlington