This request is for the support of a total of 20 trainees (graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) and junior faculty members to attend the Sixth International Congress of Reproductive Immunology which will be held at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C. on July 19-23, 1995. This meeting will also be the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Immunology for 1995. These meetings have brought together the international community of scientists and clinicians working in reproductive immunology, and they have been a major stimulus to the growth of the field and to the directions that it has taken. The proceedings have always been published, and we plan to publish the proceedings of this Sixth Congress. The program includes international leaders in the areas of research and of clinical medicine being addressed, and we hope to draw more young people into this field by allowing them to attend the Congress and to meet the various speakers and moderators. In the past this practice has been successful in drawing new people into reproductive immunology at the trainee and junior faculty levels. It has also been a major stimulus for the development of interdisciplinary research among established investigators. The Congress will be designed along novel lines both to address a broadly critical problem in reproductive sciences - population - and to integrate different lines of research around conceptual approaches rather than the more traditional organ- based or disciplinary approaches. The main topics are: (l) Population Dynamics that will include demographic, governmental and industrial perspectives as well as scientific ones; (2) Molecular Languages in Pregnancy Immunology that will consider the molecules, such as cytokines that mediate immune reactions in the reproductive tract; (3) Immunoregulation of Fertility; and (4) Clinical Reproductive Immunology.
