For the first time in Iowa State’s history, a research conference will help graduate and professional students showcase their work.

The planned conference is the first of its kind on campus. It would offer students a chance to receive feedback from their colleagues and professors. The conference will also be an opportunity for undergraduates who have questions about graduate school to experience it first-hand.

The co-chairs leading the conference are Peter Huffman, graduate in materials science and engineering, and Vivek Lawana, a graduate in biomedical sciences; both are actively involved in the Graduate and Professional Student Senate.

“We want to invite the graduate and professional students at ISU to present their research to each other, to foster collaboration but to know what everyone else is doing,” Huffman said.

The graduate and professional students will participate in either an oral presentation or a poster presentation of their current research.

The deciding factor of which presentations students will do will come down to the number of submissions the co-chairs receive. Huffman said the committee would like to see 100 speakers and 100 posters.

The conference will be a daylong event with various activities throughout.

“First will be the grant writing workshop,” Lawana said. “During graduate school, graduates have to go through some grant writing processes. It is a very basic thing that they would like to learn.”

Along with the grant writing workshops, presentations and award ceremonies for the best presenters, undergraduates are encouraged to attend the graduate-undergraduate panel.

“We will have a graduate panel of six to seven graduates which will be talking to undergraduates about questions regarding graduate school, courses, life and professors,” Lawana said. “That is the way [undergraduates] will get exposed to graduate research and meet all the graduate students from ISU.”

Since this will be the first conference of its kind at Iowa State, Huffman and Lawana do not have a goal of participants to shoot for this year. Although, the response to the event has been good and Huffman has heard from at least 200 students who expressed interest in the conference.

With the fundraising thus far, the conference is expected to be free of charge for participating students.

“Part of what we are doing with all the fundraising, especially with going to all the colleges, is to make sure it is free to everyone that wants to participate,” Huffman said.

The selection and submission process is to be discussed at a committee meeting in the near future. So it is unclear how the submissions will be selected and how the research will be judged by the professors.

Lawana said participants should analyze the research they are presenting and present in a way that the general public can understand.

The conference will be April 4, 2014. A schedule of speakers and workshops will be released early next semester.