The goal of this application is to provide support for the Young Investigator Symposium at the annual meeting of the Workshop on Steroid Hormones and Brain Function, held in Breckenridge, Colorado each Spring. The 2002 meeting, to be held March 23-27, will be the 10th annual meeting, which has featured a Young Investigator Symposium every year since 1994. Five participants in the Young Investigator Symposium are selected, through a competitive process, by a vote of the organizing committee, which consists of well-established researchers in the field. The symposium, always held as the first symposium of the meeting, showcases the research of talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Each participant presents a 20-25 minute talk, followed by a period for questioning. The meeting is limited to approximately 100 attendees which allows ample opportunity for the young investigators to interact with well-established researchers in an informal and intimate environment. Several of these previous participants in the Young Investigator Symposium have become well- established investigators, and many have continued to publish in the field of steroid hormones and brain function or other areas of neuroscience. The meeting presents seven additional symposia, each organized by interested researchers. A call for proposals is sent to approximately 500 researchers in the summer prior to the meeting. This usually results in 10-12 proposals, which are voted upon by the organizing committee. The topics of the symposia range widely from molecular biology to behavior. The field of steroid hormones and brain function has grown remarkably since the early days of traditional neuroendocrinology. It is now recognized that steroid hormones affect nearly all aspects of neural function, including various motivated behaviors, addiction, memory, neural development including sexual differentiation, cognitive processes, neural transmission and receptors, signal transduction mechanisms, drug interactions and emotional outlook. There is no comparable annual meeting that addresses these aspects of steroid hormones and brain function. Thus, this meeting provides a unique opportunity for young investigators to gain insight into a rapidly evolving and important field of research.
