11th Structural Birth Defects Meeting

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): For the past 15 years, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development has organized ten Structural Birth Defects Meetings with the goal of bringing together investigators funded through the NICHD Birth Defects Initiative. The overriding goal of these meetings has been to foster a collaborative environment for the exchange of research findings to enhance the translation of basic knowledge and insights from functional genomic studies into the development of new, innovative, and efficacious strategies for the molecular diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of human structural birth defects. Funded investigators spanned multiple disciplines and included developmental biologists, cell biologists, biophysicists, clinicians, genomicists, geneticists, epidemiologists, and biostatisticians and bioinformaticians. At any given meeting, 50-60 investigators attended as well as relevant NIH staff. At the 10th Structural Birth Defects Meeting in December 2014, a decision was made to transition the planning of future meetings from NICHD staff to the structural birth defects research community opening the way for attendance by others from the research community and, in particular, trainees. This application seeks funding for the 11th Structural Birth Defects Meeting to be held April 3-5, 2017 in Bethesda, MD at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Conference Center under the sponsorship of the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB). The intent is to more than double the size of the meeting while maintaining the interactive, multidisciplinary nature of the presentations and discussions. There are no concurrently running sessions and all participants are expected to attend all the presentations. The format of the meeting consists predominately of short presentations of hypothesis driven findings grouped into several topic areas followed by discussion. As has become the tradition, a keynote speaker is invited from an area not necessarily mainstream to birth defects research but of high relevance to the field thus stimulating discussion and exchange of new ideas. A second speaker is invited to introduce a topic which will then be discussed more formally by a roundtable panel as well as all participants. For the first time poster sessions will be held to facilitate participation of as man trainees as possible. These will be held during extended lunch breaks on two days allowing for adequate participation by all. Informal evening activities will engage senior scientists and trainees to encourage mentoring and networking.