Scope: Fazleena Badurdeen: Confucius Institute Faculty International Travel Grant

This faculty grant application is to seek support to attend the 17th Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing (GCSM), scheduled to be held at Tongji University in Shanghai, China from October 9-11, 2019. The 16th in the series of this conference was held October 2-4, 2018 in Lexington KY, jointly organized by the University of Kentucky’s (UK) Institute for Sustainable Manufacturing (ISM) and the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) (https://gcsm.eu/). I served as one of the conference co-chairs and was responsible for all aspects of conference organization. I am also a member of the Scientific Committee for the GCSM. In addition to the keynote and technical presentations, panel discussions, and poster sessions, the conference also included an international student competition with teams from UK and TUB to solve a sustainable manufacturing problem that has impact on society. The two student teams interacted with each other prior to the conference to exchange ideas and learn about the different values, regulations, and practices common to their respective regions. This multi-country/region approach was instrumental in helping students better understand the sustainable manufacturing problem and propose more robust solutions.