We request partial support for the 2014 Society for Research on Biological Rhythms Conference, to be held at the Big Sky Resort in Big Sky MT, from June 14-18, 2014. This meeting, which attracts over 600 attendees, will focus on the breadth of topics that represent key research areas in chronobiology, including molecular biology, genetics, cell biology, neurobiology, physiology, metabolism, cancer, aging, immunology, behavior, sleep, mathematical modeling, and applied research. The theme of meeting is """"""""the relevance of biological clocks to science and society"""""""", which reflects the extent to which circadian clocks affect essentially all aspects of physiology and disease. The meeting will feature 18 symposia of invited speakers, and 12 slide sessions (selected from submitted abstracts) that combine the best of basic clock research with those that translate this information into human applications. The symposium speakers and session chairs are recognized leaders in their fields, and were chosen to represent our breadth and realize our goal of bridging basic and applied circadian clock research. Special attention has been given to cultural and geographical diversity, as well as gender balance.
We aim to improve this diversity further through advertisement of the meeting at minority institutions, and with NIH funding, to provide offers of travel awards to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and under-represented groups. To further encourage participation, these groups will be given priority status when selecting presenters for the slide sessions. All meeting abstracts will be made available to the public on the SRBR web site. Training aspects of the meeting are fully developed, and include a highly subscribed one- day training day for students and postdocs, and junior faculty workshops, which precede the main meeting.
The circadian clock regulates rhythms in a wide range of processes in organisms spanning all phyla, and understanding the molecular, biochemical, cellular, and neuronal mechanism of the clock holds great promise for developing treatments for mental illness, sleep disorders, jet lag, and other human health problems, including metabolic disease, cancer, and addiction. The field is rapidly growing and continuing to expand into areas that in the past were not typically aligned with chronobiology, including aging, cancer, metabolism, and immunology. This conference will bring together experts and trainees who are in the best position to integrate basic research from diverse organisms and translate it into applied medicine to benefit society.
