Conference grant application to support the American Psychosomatic Society's 74th Annual Scientific Meeting



 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 74th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society (APS) in Denver, Colorado (March 9 - 12, 2016). 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 2016 meeting, "Translating Research into Practice: From Bench to Policy," 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 11 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, recognized world-wide as the field of cardiovascular behavioral medicine. Planned NHLBI-related programming for the 2016 meeting includes a keynote address by Dr. Dean Ornish, an invited symposium on neuroinflammation, and an invited symposium on behavioral interventions in health disparities populations. Policy issues related to Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine will be highlighted in a plenary session debate on empirical evidence related to the positive and negative health effects of cannabis use, which was first legalized in Colorado. Each of these topics builds on NHLBI themes and capitalizes on regional expertise across the translational spectrum. Regular presenters in Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine include luminaries such as Drs. 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% from 2003 to 2013. Support is also requested from other institutes (e.g., NCI, NCCAM) given the diversity of disciplines and specialties represented at this meeting. There is no other comparable scientific meeting that overlaps with the content of the annual APS meeting, including its training opportunities. In this competing renewal, we propose to provide support for up to 10 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. Narrative: Providing strong support and guidance to promising pre- and post-doctoral students is crucial for the advancement of all fields of science. The competing renewal of R13 HL074923 proposes to provide travel support for up to 15 trainees to attend the 74th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society (APS).