Promoting Diversity, Inclusion, and Professional Development in the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society

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Project Summary The mission of NIMH is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery, and cure. This application proposes to enhance training, mentorship, racial and ethnic inclusion, gender diversity and expansion of professional development for trainees and early stage investigators to the annual International Behavioral Neuroscience Society (IBNS). This proposal seeks to: 1) Provide financial support for trainees and early stage investigators to attend the annual IBNS meeting. Such funding will provide opportunities to showcase their research, as well as formalized network and mentee-mentorship opportunities with leading scientists in the field that extend throughout the trainees’ careers; 2) Continue support of workshops that focus on training, enhancing, and promoting diversity and inclusion within IBNS, with outreach that goes beyond the annual meeting; 3) Ensure that the junior women and trainees from underrepresented groups supported by these funds obtain training in targeting NIMH scientific priorities consistent with the IBNS mission. Given that psychiatric disorders are categorized by their behavioral abnormalities, it is imperative to determine neural mechanisms underlying such behaviors, and critically, cross-species biomarkers of behavior. The IBNS since its creation in 1992, has been at the forefront of investigating behavior and underlying neural circuitry using the innovative neuroscientific tools integrated with sophisticated behavioral tools in order to: 1) Identify mechanisms of complex behaviors; 2) Determine potential neural biomarkers of such behaviors; 3) How these mechanisms are affected in disease states; 4) Target such mechanisms for preventions and cures; and 5) Improve behavioral neuroscience approaches for rigor and reproducibility and identify sex differences relevant to human behaviors. Given its international nature, IBNS has also been at the forefront at recruiting diverse viewpoints across science. With an additional goal for training the next generation of neuroscientists looking to understand and cure diseases, IBNS provides 20-26 Travel Awards annually, creating a safe space for diverse trainees. With this application, we wish to promote additional diversity of our travel awardees, as well as fund educational workshops to aid trainees from undergraduate, graduate, post doctoral (within 5 years), and early stage investigators (within 2 years of faculty appointment. This application therefore requests funding to increase the opportunities for trainees to attend our 2021 annual meetings.