Funds are requested to help support the Ninth International Congress of Neuroethology (ICN) to held on August 2-7, 2010 in Salamanca, Spain. The ICN, which is organized by the International Society for Neuroethology, has been held every three years since 1986 and attracts hundreds or researchers from around the world. The focus of these meetings is to bring together diverse neuroscientists who are investigating the neural basis of behavior across a broad spectrum of both vertebrates and invertebrates. This meeting provides an outstanding venue for discussions among international scientists who have a broad range of perspectives, but who focus on common basic-science questions that have important implications for neural function and disease. The program for 2010 includes 17 invited symposia, four Participant Symposia in which the speakers will be selected from submitted abstracts where special emphasis will be given to selecting graduate students and postdoctoral fellows as presenters. There also will be 8 plenary sessions on topics such as bird song learning, neural networks for olfactory behavior, acoustic communication, molecular evolution of vision, behaviors guided by pheromones, among others. While a wide variety of areas in neurobiology will be addressed in the Congress, many of the topics are relevant to the mission of the NIDCD. Specifically, 28 talks in the 17 symposia focus on chemosensation, hearing, audio- visual interactions, or comparative aspects of language acquisition or comprehension and its neural underpinnings. The list will almost certainly grow when the speakers in the Participant Symposia are chosen. Support is requested to fund travel and registration for winners of the Young Investigator Awards, for student and minority neuroscientists, and for the dissemination of the proceedings of the conference. The benefits to American scientists in general, and to young investigators in particular, will be the opportunity for exposure to cutting-edge research and techniques from around the world in a format and venue that encourage interactions between students and investigators at all levels of experience.
The conference will address major themes in the neural mechanisms that underlie normal behavior with an emphasis on understanding the pathways in the brain that perceive sensory inputs, make major decisions and encode the appropriate movements. Many neural diseases result from defects in these processing steps. To understand the functional basis of abnormal neural function and disease states, multiple perspectives drawn from a variety of organisms are often critical. The comparative viewpoints and emerging technologies that are emphasized at the ICN therefore have the potential to contribute to the diagnosis of nervous system diseases and the development of treatments.
