Did you know? ECS awarded 82 students with travel grants to attend the latest ECS meeting, AiMES, last week in Cancun, Mexico. And, of all the presentations given at AiMES, 27% came from student oral presentations and student posters. We couldn’t have done it without your help and support! 

Your donations helped provide young researchers with the opportunity to learn and bring more value to their work, explore new opportunities and network at our international meetings. But don’t take our word for it. Take theirs:

Samuel Castro Pardo, a PhD student at Rice University in Texas, says because of his travel grant, he was able to attend AiMES last week and discover a solution he was looking for. “I’ve been struggling with a project for a few months, and a speaker mentioned something during a talk, and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I think I know why my experiment isn’t working.'” Pardo is already planning for future experiments with this newfound information.

 

Raisa Oliveira, a PhD student from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugual, says she wouldn’t have been able to attend AiMES without her travel grant, as her supervisor doesn’t have the finances to support the trip. “It’s an amazing opportunity to be here,” said Oliveira. “I can be drinking coffee, look up, and say, ‘this is the person whose paper I read yesterday.’ I’m meeting my stars, my scientific stars.”

 

Matthias Künzel, a PhD student from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, says his travel grant allowed him to attend AiMES, which he finds particularly important due to its international reach. “I think people learn different in different countries,” says Künzel. “In Germany, we follow rules strictly. Talking to other people who have different views pushes you to approach things differently.”

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Help early-career researchers reach their potential!

Young researchers Guruprakash Karkera and Madeline Sciullo share what receiving the ECS travel grant meant to them and put in perspective why the grant is more than funding; it’s a gateway to the future. Here are their stories:

Madeline Sciullo, travel grant recipient

Worldwide reach

Madeline Sciullo is a fourth-year student studying electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida.

She says she realized her first time attending and presenting at an ECS meeting, which happened to be PRiME 2016 in Honolulu, Hawaii, would be costly. But, she knew it was a meeting she had to attend.

“These international meetings are so crucial to the development of the field,” says Sciullo, of why she found it particularly important to attend the ECS meeting. “A lot of the work that I’m doing, nobody in the United States is doing. So there’s no point for me going to a conference that only has attendees from the United States.” (more…)

Dai Shen says the travel grant lead to opportunities.

The travel grant recipient shares his first-hand experience.

Meet Dai Shen. He is a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University and received an ECS travel grant to attend his first ECS meeting — the 232nd ECS Meeting in National Harbor, Maryland. Every meeting, ECS awards a number of travel grants to defray the costs of attending our meetings. This provides an invaluable experience for students and early career scientists and engineers.

Unfortunately, we only have the funding to support 52% of requests at AiMES. You can change that for future meetings by donating today! (more…)