This is a new application for the Annual Summer 2014 Symposium of the Basic Cardiovascular Sciences Council of the American Heart Association. This conference has had continuous support from the NHLBI for the last 9 years and this will be the 10th Anniversary meeting. Support from the NHLBI has helped foster a meeting that has become the """"""""go to"""""""" conference dealing with molecular cardiovascular biology and disease. It represents its sponsor, the Basic Cardiovascular Sciences (BCVS) Council of the American Heart Association, which is the world's leading organization of cardiovascular scientists. Ths conference started originally two decades ago as the Council held a Molecular Cardiology conference in 1991 and then had several meetings initially hailed as the Snowbird Conference as it was held during the summer at Snowbird, Utah. The meeting became an annual event in 2002 and since 2004 this conference has been recognized as a permanent, recurring scientific meeting of the AHA and R13 funding also commenced. The conference in recent years has begun to mix in translational topics as well as the """"""""bread and butter"""""""" of this meeting, which is basic molecular cardiovascular research. The conference has always attracted the leading researchers in fields such as microRNAs, cardiac gene and cell therapy, cardiac development and most recently, tissue engineering and iPS cells. The attendance of this conference has climbed every year and in 2013 we had an all-time high attendance of over 550. As in past years, the conference will be held in July and will be in Las Vegas. The meeting will be held in the Paris Hotel with meeting space in the Paris Las Vegas Conference Center. The planned agenda represents an ambitious, fast-paced meeting with 12 sessions over 4 days (July 14-17, 2014) with two of these sessions being Keynote lectures. This year's Keynote lectures have been planned with Drs. Helen Hobbs and Peter Reddien being the speakers. Young cardiovascular scientists will be highlighted as well through invited talks in each session and Posters will be presented on 3 days of the conference. Organizers of this meeting are Drs. Burns Blaxall (Cincinnati Children's Hospital), Ju Chen (UCSD) and Joseph Wu (Stanford). The proposal request constitutes approximately 7% of the total meeting budget and as we have down over the last several years, support from this application will be used toward Cardiovascular Outreach Awards (minority travel awards) and New Investigator Travel Awards.
This proposal is for support of the annual conference (2014) of the Basic Cardiovascular Sciences Council of the American Heart Association. This meeting meets every July and is attended by basic and translational cardiovascular scientists where scientific exchang in this field is at its highest level. This meeting and those like it can accelerate discoveies pertinent to new therapies for heart disease, which are greatly needed. This meeting is a great learning experience for junior scientists and trainees and thus, optimizes the future return of investment in medical research by public dollars. (End of Abstract)
