The Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (SBN) is requesting funds to spearhead a new initiative to promote the exchange and implementation of emerging methods and technologies that can be applied to Behavioral Neuroscience. The initiative will begin with a half-day workshop "Emerging Methods and Technologies in Behavioral Neuroscience" held immediately prior to the 2007 annual SBN meeting. The workshop will feature presentations emphasizing the application of state-of-the-art methods and Technologies to Behavioral Neuroscience. Following the presentations, each speaker will lead a small discussion group with participants. The target audience for the workshop will be junior faculty, post-docs, and graduate students since the future of the field depends on the ability of young researchers to incorporate new methods and technologies into their research programs. Web sites are an exceptional tool to facilitate the sharing of ideas, methods, data, and experiences broadly and efficiently. Currently there is no such site for our field. The proceedings of the workshop will be used to begin an interactive website so researchers can more easily share information and establish collaborations. A portion of the site will incorporate an electronic bulletin board format. Researchers will be able to post technical questions, protocols, unpublished data to share, and requests for new students or postdocs to join their groups. To avoid common pitfalls, it is critical for a researcher to know which methods have been tried but do not work. Currently this information is not readily accessible, but could be on this database. To make the database accessible to as many researchers as possible, it will be incorporated into the SBN website (www.sbn.org) and open to the scientific community as soon as possible.
