This project will fund registration awards for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior investigators who require funding to attend the 2013 Molecular Genetics of Bacteria and Phages Conference to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from August 6-10, 2013. Applicants will be recruited by advertisements in scientific journals and direct emails to a broad email list that includes past and probable conference attendees. The advertisement directs the recipient to the conference web site (www.union.wisc.edu/phages/index.html), which contains instructions for applying for a registration award. All applicants for the registration awards are required to submit an abstract for an oral or poster presentation and a letter outlining financial need. The applications and abstracts are reviewed by the conference organizers, who make awards on the basis of scientific merit and financial need. The Molecular Genetics of Bacteria and Phages conference is the direct descendent of the original 'phage meetings' organized by Delbruck, Luria, Hershey, and colleagues in the 1940s, and thus is the oldest scientific gathering focused on prokaryotic molecular biology. While the focus of the meeting has expanded over the years, it still remains dedicated to the problem-oriented philosophy and cross-disciplinary nature of the physicists, chemists, and microbiologists who founded the meeting. The conference provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest research findings and technical advances in modern prokaryotic molecular biology. It is the primary scientific meeting for many laboratories working with bacteria and phage; the average attendance is over 325. A central aspect and major attraction of the meeting is the breadth and interdisciplinary emphasis of the research presented. The 2013 meeting will integrate sessions ranging from basic phage genetics to genome enabled biology, from atomic level structure-function analyses to microbial cell biology, from single-molecule biochemistry to viral self-assembly, and from host interactions to ecology and evolution. The diversity of research areas is mirrored by the diversity of organisms investigated, including model organisms as well as environmentally relevant bacteria and phages. The importance of assembling researchers who take diverse approaches to solving problems of relevance to microbes is a priority, particularly those that are transforming microbiology by using genome enabled approaches and integrating computational biology with experiments.
Broader Impacts: A key objective of the meeting is to provide a broad educational experience for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and other young scientists who constitute over half of the attendees of the meeting. Nearly all the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows attending this meeting give a poster or oral presentation. It is one of the few remaining open-program meetings, where the majority of the oral presentations are selected from submitted abstracts and all of the vibrant poster sessions run for the entire meeting. Consequently, the people actually performing the research give most of the presentations. Another goal of the meeting is to have a diverse group of scientists as session chairs and presenters. In addition, leading scientists are invited to present comprehensive introductions to the 9 scientific sessions and short talks on their own works. The session chairs represent a mixture of established senior investigators and prominent emerging junior investigators. The keynote speaker will be a distinguished interdisciplinary scientist. The session leaders and keynote speaker remain on site for the majority of the meeting. As such, scientific experts are always in the audience, which ensures high scientific standards and critical yet supportive questioning and commentary at the conclusion of talks. The close proximity of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior and senior faculty generates a unique atmosphere for scientific and educational interactions.
