? ? The Gordon Research Conference entitled """"""""Cilia, Mucus and Mucociliary Interactions"""""""" will be held in ? Ventura Beach, CA from February 4 to 9, 2007. The conference has been approved by the GRC committee and will represent the second meeting following the successful """"""""trial"""""""" GRC of the same title that was held in Buellton, CA in February of 2005. Previous meetings on this topic, but not Gordon conferences, were held in Miami Beach in 2002 and at Lake Garda, Italy in 1999. The general organization of the conference will follow the established and very successful formula of the previous (2005) Gordon Research Conference. There will be a total of 9 plenary sessions from Sunday evening to Thursday evening. Each session will feature at least 4 invited talks and will be chaired by two prominent senior discussion leaders. The goal is to present new data not yet published according to the ? tradition of Gordon Research Conferences. Each of the speakers and discussion leaders will be individuals with a recognized scientific record in the areas of cilia, mucus, or mucociliary interactions or young investigators presenting outstanding data, usually representing work from the laboratory of a recognized leader in the field. Discussion leaders will be selected from individuals capable of stimulating discussion and knowledgeable in their areas to be able to maintain focus and steer discussion to areas related directly to the topic area. In addition, it is anticipated that late invited short talks (5-10 minutes plus discussion time) will complement each plenary session and chosen as late as possible in order to represent true cutting edge and state-of-the-art work. These will be selected from the pool of participants/discussants and from any of the poster/abstract submissions. In addition to the plenary platform presentations, each session will be complemented by poster presentations. The applicants will have the opportunity to indicate if they prefer a poster of platform venue, and those not chosen for platform presentation will be delegated to the poster session(s). The last GRC had a total of about 80 posters, which seems to be a good number to shoot for to generated optimal interactions. If needed, room for laptops will be available for individuals who might wish to present additional data that cannot be easily shown on posters, such as 3-D molecular modeling, 3-D reconstruction of confocal images, videomicroscopy and time-lapse microscopy movies, all of which are particularly well-suited for cilia and mucociliary studies. The primary viewing time for the posters will be during the late afternoons. ? ? ?
