Meeting: 2016 Neurobiology of Stress Workshop, Irvine California, April 12-15, 2016

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

The goals of this four-day workshop on the Neurobiology of Stress are to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines and at all professional levels (undergraduate student to full professor) to share and discuss recent advances in the neurobiology of stress research, promote intensive exchange of ideas across disciplines, foster community among stress researchers, and nurture professional development for trainees and junior faculty participants. This workshop, which takes place in Newport Beach, CA, is the 4th of a biannual workshop series that offers the only small forum focused on the neurobiology of stress. The award provides support to junior faculty, trainees, and high school science teachers to attend this workshop. The intellectual merit of the workshop derives from its relatively small size, which promotes interactions and extensive exchange of ideas among participants, the assembly of top neuroscientists in the field of stress, and the multidisciplinary nature of the plenary session topics. With a substantial fraction of the speakers being women and about half of the participants being trainees, including trainees recruited through national minority scientist networks, this workshop reaches out to and offers opportunities for groups underrepresented in science. The inclusion of local science high school teachers in this workshop seeds dissemination of insights in classrooms. The topics of this workshop on the Neurobiology of Stress range from epigenetics and stress to evolutionary perspectives on stress, and incorporate recent advances in molecular biology, genetics, microbiotics, imaging, and systems biology. The format entails 5 plenary sessions with 4 speakers each; 2 roundtable sessions, one of which is dedicated to mentoring of trainees in small informal groups; poster sessions (trainee presenters only); and one keynote lecture. Workshop participants will be invited to contribute manuscripts reporting findings related to workshop topics to the open access journal Neurobiology of Stress. The broader impacts of this workshop include broadening participation, extensive opportunity for exchange across professional levels, and public outreach to the local schools. These aspects, combined with the workshop's central goal of exchanging and advancing promising new ideas in stress research, constitute long-term benefits for the larger stress neurobiology community.