GORDON CONFERENCE ON NEUROETHOLOGY

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Funds are requested to help support the first Gordon Research Conference on Neuroethology, to be held on 29 August - 3 September 1999 at Queen's College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK. Funds received from NIH would be used to defray partially the travel and meeting costs incurred by invited speakers and session chairs/discussion leaders from the USA. In addition, registration and travel scholarships are requested for young investigators (postdocs and graduate students) from the USA, with preference to be given to members of under-represented groups. The Conference will focus on selected, important topics in the interrelated and overlapping fields of animal behavior, neurobiology, and evolutionary and comparative organismal biology in relation to neuroethology. Emphasis will be placed on sensory mechanisms underlying specific adaptive behaviors, and topics chosen for treatment in this conference are ones regarded as currently undergoing conceptual and technological growth. All of the invited speakers and session chairs/discussion leaders are experts in their fields of science who have been selected by the meeting organizers with the assistance of an ad-hoc committee of advisors. Special attention has been given to achieving a balanced mixture of women and men among the invitees, as well as representation of a variety of research preparations, technical approaches, and levels of analysis. In contrast to other meetings on neuroethology (e.g. the triennial International Congresses of Neuroethology), or on related fields such as neuroscience (e.g. the annual meetings of the Society for Neuroscience), this new Gordon Research Conference will be restrictive in scope and attendance in order to encourage and facilitate open, animated, and critical group discussion of ideas, experimental findings, and future research initiatives. The need for such a meeting arises from dramatic recent growth of knowledge in all of the interrelated fields that are central to the conference, including neuroscience, neuroethological mechanisms, evolutionary and comparative animal biology, biomimetic robotics, and sensory sciences. The principal aim of the new conference is to create an open forum, according to the well established and highly respected Gordon Research Conference format, in which experts and trainees in areas of science central to the meeting focus can share their most recent findings, ideas, and speculations and foster new research collaborations.