This award will support participation of students, postdocs, and early-career faculty in the 10th International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology, Barcelona, Spain, July 8th -12th, 2013. Morphology, the study of form or shape, is the foundational field for a diversity of areas of biological research including developmental biology, biomechanics, paleontology and evolutionary biology. Symposium topics are forward looking and interdisciplinary, and include sessions on Hominin evolution, the function and evolution of the nose, the function of non-contractile components of muscle and the curation and analysis of 3-D data. The Congress will bring together leaders in the field from around the world, students and post-doctoral fellows, and integrative scientists from related disciplines. The international nature of the meeting is an excellent opportunity for students, postdoctoral researchers and junior faculty to develop productive collaborations with non-US researchers and to gain new insights and perspectives about the conduct of scientific research and infrastructure in different countries. The funding will be used to partially offset the travel and registration costs for 25 presenters at the meeting. Travel support provided through this award will be aimed at broadening participation in the meeting ensuring that greater numbers of women and members of underrepresented groups of US researchers will be able to attend. Among other broader impacts of the Congress will be the (1) integration and communication of research, (2) enhancement of research infrastructure through the encouragement of partnerships and collaborations, and (3) broad dissemination of research through publication of abstracts and posters. The posters will be available through the open source Faculty of 1000 web site.
The 10th International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology was held in Barcelona, Spain from July 8th - 12th, 2013. Participation was excellent, with 442 delegates from 31 countries presenting in 16 symposia as well as contributed paper and poster sessions. The meeting acheived the goals set forth in the proposal - fostering connections among researchers and synthesis of research; pushing the boundaries of our understanding of vertebrate morphology; and disseminating the results broadly with an open access model. Specifically, All of the abstracts were published in an open access journal. There was participation in high level scientific discussions and collaboration by a racially, ethnically and geographically diverse group of scientists at every career stage from undergraduate to emeritus professor. There was a partial resolution of major disagreements about the development of turtles. A journal volume on the function and evolution of the vertebrate axis was published in a peer reviewed journal. The introductory article was published open access. There was an exploration of the possibility of broadening the American Anatomical Association to include more comparative morphology research which has led to a joint meeting in 2015. Workshops from 3-D visualization and finite element modeling software companies exposed the participants to this cutting edge technology. There was also an open market for recruiting post-doctoral scholars in the context of potential advisors being able to examine the research of potential candidates first hand. This has already led to multiple year job offers.
