Western Tri-State Consortium First Annual Meeting

Monday, March 30, 2009 - Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Annual Meeting of Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico
Theme: Building Regional Collaborations
 
New Mexico, Nevada and Idaho, the three member states of the EPSCoR Tri-State Western Consortium, held their first joint annual meeting in Boise, Idaho, on March 30 – April 1, 2009. Idaho EPSCoR did a wonderful job of hosting the meeting and evaluations from attendees rated all aspects of the event as excellent. The meeting was well attended, with more than 100 research scientists, educators, and policy makers present for the 2 days (attendee list by institution). Idaho Lt. Gov. Brad Little reinforced the importance of NSF EPSCoR capacity-building support to the states in his keynote address, particularly discussing consortium research directed towards understanding future climate change and its impacts on vegetation and water resources. Denise Barnes and Arlene Garrison, from the NSF EPSCoR Program Office, were available for discussions and questions related to NSF future directions. Morning plenary sessions of the second day were devoted to best practices for broadening participation. Both days had afternoon concurrent sessions with presentations covering all components of the state EPSCoR programs. A full agenda is available online at the link below.

Goals for the first joint meeting were well met. A fundamental goal was for scientists from the 3 states to meet and get to know one another. Breakout sessions on science, policy and education topics permitted attendees to become familiar with the research and education programs being conducted in each state. The overarching goal for the meeting was to make concrete progress toward future collaborations and the final recap session showed many avenues for productive work.

The complete agenda is available: Building Regional Collaborations

Idaho EPSCoR Nevada EPSCoR New Mexico EPSCoR
This material is based in part upon work supported by: The National Science Foundation under grant number(s) IIA-1329469, IIA-1329470 and IIA-1329513. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.