The Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) was founded in 1939 and will be celebrating its 80th anniversary in 2019. It grew from an initially restricted membership society of 300 to today?s over 2,200 members worldwide, the largest devoted to this field. Its membership now includes undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, junior and established investigators, many of whom hold NIH grants and fellowships. The Society has organized the major meeting in developmental biology for the past 80 years (missing two during World War II). Since the annual meeting changed its format from a single theme symposium to an open, inclusive meeting in 1993, the number of participants has grown over three-fold (from 236 in 1994 to an average of 740 in the last 15 years). The inclusion of cutting edge themes and burgeoning areas of developmental biology such as stem cell and regenerative biology, together with the fast technical advances that allowed investigators to find explanations to questions unanswered before also contributed to this growth in attendance, as well as to standing of developmental biology today in biomedical research and public interest. Developmental biologists leverage innovations in imaging and genomics to advance understanding of embryogenesis, organogenesis and stem cell biology with relevance to birth defects, precision and regenerative medicine. In addition, by allowing presentations by undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, the meeting is also a training ground for the next generation of scientists in this and related subjects: both to present their research and to meet future advisors, mentors and collaborators. This proposal requests funds for partial support of the Society?s annual meetings for the next five years (2019-2023). The proposed meetings will continue the tradition of mixing poster presentations, plenary sessions, concurrent symposia, the Hilde Mangold Postdoctoral Symposium, the awards lectures, an education symposium and workshops on new technologies, education and current issues. In all sessions, a special effort is made to have a diversity of invited speakers in terms of: model organisms, experimental approaches, geographical location of the speakers? institutions, their career stages, gender and racial/ethnic background. In addition to longer talks by invited speakers, the symposia include short and poster-teaser talk slots for abstracts selected from submissions, with preference given to qualified junior investigators. The education symposium and workshops focus on topics such as effective teaching and mentoring strategies at university and pre-college levels, outreach to the lay public, professional development, sessions to address current issues such as harassment, diversity and inclusion. They also address bioethics of research, which is highly relevant to establishing national policies for research on stem cells, cloning and genome editing, as well as public understanding of the scientific process and evolution.
The Annual Meetings of the Society for Developmental Biology (78th in 2019) are the major gathering in the field for scientists at all stages of their career from around the World. Researchers working on various organisms and human pluripotent cells and using different approaches present their own work and learn about the latest findings from each other. These meetings also provide a forum for sound, evidence-based discussions of advances in developmental biology and related areas as applied to medicine, agriculture and national science policy.
