This proposal requests partial support for an international meeting on Neuroethology as part of the Gordon Research Conference series to be held in Magdalen College Oxford August 10-15, 2008, and the preceding Graduate Research Seminar. The broad and long term goal of the conference is to increase our understanding of the evolution of neural circuits.
The specific aim of this meeting is to convene 42 speakers that represent critical areas of neuroethology, evolution and development with a total of 135 participants for a five day conference in an isolated academic setting. Since the Gordon Conferences are an excellent forum for bringing together students and leaders in the field to discuss cutting edge problems, the intention of this meeting is to pose provocative questions on subjects that will generate real discussion. Prior to the official Gordon Research Conference, there will be a GRC program called """"""""Graduate Research Seminar: Neuroethology 2050"""""""", where graduate students and post-docs will meet to discuss in an informal atmosphere what they think the future of neuroethology holds. The main program will have a keynote address and seven sessions. It will start with two sessions on the fundamentals: First, a session on current views of the origin of nervous systems and second one on homology, homoplasy, and divergence in neural circuits to discuss whether evolution always yields a common solution to similar problems of neural coding. The conference will also concentrate on three other areas with broad interdisciplinary impact. There will be a discussion about the evolution and development (evo-devo) of neural circuits in order to ask how much can be learned about the function of neural circuits from developmental and genetics rules. A session will be devoted to neural circuit properties underlying decision- making in different systems and one to discuss variability and homeostasis. The last two sessions concern future directions for the field. One session will discuss animal models of human characteristics where the questions will be raise about whether researchers are anthropomorphizing or whether there are fundamental common substrates for human traits such as love, dreaming, and social interactions? Our final session is a round table discussion on uncovering general principles in neuroethology. In addition, there will be poster session each evening to permit all participants to contribute. The significance of this application is that the Gordon Research Conference on Neuroethology is a critical component of the yearly series of conferences that propel research in the international community of neurobiologists working on how nervous systems integrate sensory signals within specific environmental contexts to provide behaviors, and how such behaviors, and thus the circuits underlying them, adapt to the natural environment.
The health relatedness of this application is that the discussions will define the questions that require experimental resolution in the studies of neural plasticity, motor control, neural genetics, and modeling. The Gordon Conference on Neuroethology: Behavior, Evolution, and Neurobiology, which will be held August 10-15th at Magdalen College in Oxford England, provides a unique opportunity for researchers from around the world to discuss emerging concepts related to the evolution and function of neural circuits. There will be a special pre-meeting Graduate Research Seminar to enhance the training experience for graduate students. Explicitly examining the evolutionary and comparative aspects of neural circuits will provide insights on the origin and cause of many human neurological and behavioral conditions. ? ? ? ? ?
