2016 Gordon Research Conference on Environmental Sciences: Water: Opportunities for Aquatic Sciences to Impact a Changing World

1601288

MacKay

Funding is requested to support the June, 2016, Gordon Research Conference on Environmental Sciences: Water in Holderness, NH. The 2016 conference theme is Opportunities for Aquatic Sciences to Impact a Changing World and will focus on the critical contributions that aquatic sciences will make in a world experiencing climate, population, and resource pressures. The conference will bring together 180 participants from multiple countries in an informal setting. The program will consist of plenary talks by established and emerging researchers who are conducting the most innovative and significant research on diverse aspects of environmental aquatic science.

In 2016, the Gordon Research Conference on Environmental Sciences: Water, will continue its long tradition of surveying priority and emerging issues across all aspects of aquatic environmental science. The scope will span multiple disciplines (chemistry, biology, geology, engineering, toxicology, human health), media (soil, groundwater, surface water, atmospheric water, drinking water, wastewater), and scales (molecular, nano, cellular, ecosystem, global). The overarching theme of the 2016 conference recognizes that many of the challenges are intimately linked to water. This proposal advances NSF's broader mission in several ways. First, there are direct societal benefits that arise from the major application of work to be presented at the conference. The need for sufficient amounts of water of appropriate quality for human activities and protection of ecosystem health will be just one discussed benefit.. Solutions to these problems require ideas from, and interactions among, multiple disciplines to allow proper action and development of environmental policy. Second, the conference advances discovery while promoting teaching, training, and learning by offering a platform for graduate student and postdoctoral researchers to present their research and participate fully in the conference activities. The conference also provides a forum for interactions between senior scientists and students and broad participation of scientists from groups underrepresented in science and engineering. The conference format provides an unusual and ideal means for the dissemination of research results through close interaction of participants from industry, government laboratories, and academia. Finally, the conference promotes broad participation from diverse backgrounds, both through the speaker selection and through special Gordon Research Conference funding mechanisms that target underrepresented groups. Assessment of the broader impacts will be performed via survey of participants at the conference.