All animals alive right now evolved from ancestors that once lived over 500 million years ago in shallow coastal oceans. From those original populations, their descendants adapted to inhabit many different environments (e.g. deep sea, fresh water, terrestrial), and to diversify into the dazzling variety of shapes we see today. Yet, marine organisms remain among the least-understood organisms, especially in regards to how their development, physiology, and behavior are controlled at the level of cells and molecules. The Developmental Biology of the Sea Urchin and Other Marine Invertebrates Meeting brings together scientists who use marine organisms to discovery how animals are built through the process of development, with the goal of finding both the similarities and differences among them. The meeting provides opportunities for undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty to present their work through posters, lightning talks, and concurrent session talks. All meeting participants are invited to participate in pre-meeting workshops on technology advancement, and lunchtime workshops on career development. This year’s meeting features several new initiatives to broaden participation among groups that are traditionally under-represented in the ocean biosciences. Overall, the meeting will lead to a deeper and wider understanding of how marine organisms function and reproduce in their environments; this exchange of knowledge is critical for understanding basic biological process, as well as for understanding how organisms will respond to changing ocean environments in the coming decades.
The Developmental Biology of the Sea Urchin and Other Marine Invertebrates (DBSUMI) meeting will be held at the Marine Biological Laboratory in April 2020. It attracts a diverse group of >150 scientists who use marine invertebrates to study cell biology, developmental biology, neurobiology, regeneration, immunology, genomics, and evolutionary biology (among others) in a broad phylogenetic context. The meeting boasts several new initiatives including: 1) 3 pre-meeting workshops dedicated to hands on training in emerging technologies (CRISPR, scRNAseq, BAC recombineering), 2) lightning talks associated with poster sessions to promote student work, 3) a Broadening Participation Plenary session and poster session to discuss Equity, Diversity and Inclusion efforts in our fields, 4) lunch time themes on career development, 5) an increased number of non-sea urchin invited speakers, and 6) an associated Hemichordate satellite meeting. Thus, the organizers of DBSUMI 2020 have an ambitious new plan to modernize and expand the meeting to make it the nexus for labs using marine invertebrate systems in their research, teaching, and outreach. Currently, no other meeting in the world focuses on the comparative development of marine invertebrates. The meeting will help recruit the next generation of broadly trained biologists using marine organisms as experimental systems. The results of the meeting (workshops, oral sessions, career development sessions) will be disseminated in real time through social media, and post meeting reports will be published in open access journals and websites.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
