Conference grant application to support the American Psychosomatic Society's 72nd

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Providing strong support and guidance to promising pre- and post-doctoral students is crucial for the advancement of all fields of science. The overall goal of this competing renewal of R13 HL074923 is to provide travel support for trainees to attend and actively take part in the 72nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society (APS) in San Francisco, California (March 12 - 15, 2014). The essential mission of the APS is to promote and advance the scientific understanding of the interrelationships among biological, psychological, social and behavioral factors in human health and disease, and the integration of the fields of science that separately examine each, and to foster the application of this understanding in education and improved health care. This mission is instantiated in the selection of the theme for the 2014 meeting, "Stretching the Boundaries: From Mechanisms of Disease to Models of Health," which will highlight empirical research, applied methodology, and clinical applications along the translational continuum. For greater than 7 decades, the annual APS meeting has provided an outstanding forum for trainees and established investigators and clinicians working within a wide range of disciplines and specialty areas to exchange new ideas and research strategies that ultimately facilitate and improve the quality of research and its translation into clinical practice and public policy. The annual APS meeting is attended by over 500 researchers and clinicians from around the world. For the past 8 years, NHLBI has been the sponsoring institute for this award given that the annual scientific meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society is the only scientific conference focused on the bio-psycho- social determinants and consequences of cardiovascular disease. Planned programming for the 2014 meeting includes a keynote address by NHLBI Director Dr. Gary Gibbons (invitation pending) and debate on the physiological underpinnings of heart rate variability and its prognostic relevance to cardiovascular disease featuring leading physiologists, cardiovascular behavioral medicine researchers, epidemiologists and clinicians and will provide a venue for evaluating the advantages, disadvantages, and promise of heart rate variability in relation to understanding the mechanisms through which social, psychological and behavioral factors influence health and disease. Regular presenters in Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine include Drs. Neil Schneiderman, Michael Irwin, Redford Williams, Margaret Chesney, Julian Thayer, Andrew Steptoe, Karen Matthews, Stephen Manuck, and Richard Lane. Increasingly, this conference has also highlighted relationships among sleep and health with accepted abstracts focused on sleep increasing by 80% in the last ten years (2003 - 2013). Support is also requested from other institutes (e.g., NCI, NCCAM) given the diversity of disciplines and specialties represented at this meeting. In this competing renewal, we propose to provide support for up to 15 Young Scholar Awards and 5 Minority Initiative Travel Awards. The Young Scholars Award Program will provide travel awards to competitively- selected trainees who submit a first-author abstract to present a paper or poster and who are judged to show outstanding potential for a career in psychosomatic and behavioral medicine. The APS Minority Initiative Travel Award will provide support for promising trainees from racial/ethnic or other underrepresented groups to attend the annual meeting. The process of identifying and selecting APS Minority Initiative Travel Award recipients will differ, as this award seeks to extend trainee award opportunities to individuals who are not yet "stakeholders" in the process. The meeting's location in California and anticipated results from the NIH- sponsored multi-site Hispanic Community Health Study will capitalize on regional expertise in Hispanic health and health disparities, which has not been strongly represented on previous programs.