Providing strong support and guidance to promising pre- and post-doctoral students is crucial for the advancement of all fields of science. The overall goal of this NIA-supported R13 is to provide travel support for trainees to attend and actively take part in the 76th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society (APS) in Louisville, KY (March 7-10, 2018). The essential mission of the APS is to promote and advance the scientific understanding of the interrelationships among biological, psychological, social and behavioral factors in human health and disease, and the integration of the fields of science that separately examine each, and to foster the application of this understanding in education and improved health care. This mission is instantiated in the selection of the theme for the 2018 meeting, ?Optimizing Health and Resilience in a Changing World: Celebrating 75 Years of the American Psychosomatic Society,? which will highlight empirical research, applied methodology, and clinical applications along the translational continuum, with an emphasis on resilience across the lifespan. For greater than 7 decades, the annual APS meeting has provided an outstanding forum for trainees and established investigators and clinicians working within a wide range of disciplines and specialty areas to exchange new ideas and research strategies that ultimately facilitate and improve the quality of research and its translation into clinical practice and public policy. The annual APS meeting is attended by over 500 researchers and clinicians from around the world. Previously supported by NHLBI for 12 years, APS has migrated this conference grant to the NIA (AG056137) to broaden the meeting's emphasis on research and training in biological, psychosocial, and behavioral mechanisms of health and disease across the lifespan. In fact, the thematic undercurrent of much of the research and training opportunities offered at the meeting reflect mechanisms of accelerated aging and their effect modifiers including indices of resilience and growth in the wake of adversity. Planned NIA-related programming for the 2018 meeting includes a keynote address by Dr. George Bonanno on resilience to adversity ? including common challenges in late-life; a debate on the evidence regarding resilience-based interventions for improving physical health including Dr. Bonanno as well as Drs. Judy Moskowitz, Kenneth Freedland, and Jeff Huffman; an invited symposium on health behaviors that foster health and resilience with Drs. Michael Irwin, Janet Tomiyama, and Linda Carlson; and several specialized events (plenary address by Dr. Mary Dozier, symposia with linked roundtables) on adversity across the lifespan, including the impact of early adversity on health and functioning in late-life. We will also host a discussion panel on interventions focused on discrimination (broadly defined) to maintain health in late life and in the face of disease. The debate, invited symposia, and discussion panel will include interactive discussion with the audience, facilitated by Sli.Do technology and implemented successfully at the 2017 meeting. Regular presenters who highlight a lifespan approach to psychosomatic medicine research and have been NIA grantees include luminaries such as Drs. Redford Williams, Andrew Steptoe, Karen Matthews, Elissa Epel, Julian Thayer, and Stephen Manuck. R13 Investigators, Drs. Martica Hall and Mary-Frances O'Connor, are also NIA grantees. Increasingly, this conference has also highlighted sleep health in relation to aging including allostatic load, cellular and molecular indices of aging, cellular senescence, and diseases of aging. Secondary support is also requested from other institutes (e.g., NCI, NHBLI, NCCAM) given the diversity of disciplines and specialties represented at this meeting. There is no other comparable scientific meeting that overlaps with the content of the annual APS meeting, including its training opportunities. In this competing renewal, we propose to provide support for up to 15 Young Scholar Awards and 5 Minority Initiative Travel Awards. The Young Scholars Award Program will provide travel awards to competitively-selected trainees who submit a first-author abstract to present a paper or poster and who are judged to show outstanding potential for a career in psychosomatic and behavioral medicine. The APS Minority Initiative Travel Award will provide support for promising trainees from racial/ethnic or other underrepresented groups to attend the annual meeting. As described in the Conference Plan, the process of identifying and selecting APS Minority Initiative Travel Award recipients differs from the selection of the Young Scholar Awards, as this award seeks to extend trainee award opportunities to individuals who are not yet ?stakeholders? in the process.
Providing strong support and guidance to promising pre- and post-doctoral students is crucial for the advancement of all fields of science. This competing renewal R13 (AG056137) emphasizes research and training in biological, psychosocial, and behavioral mechanisms of health and disease across the lifespan. We propose to provide travel support for up to 20 trainees to attend the 76th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society (APS).
