Intellectual merit: This project funds the MEPS (Molecular and Environmental Plant Science) Symposium 2013: Plant Signaling Systems: From Cells to the Environment, to be held at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, on May 13-14, 2013. The symposium will be the 8th of the series of symposia initiated in 2005. The objectives of these symposia are to promote basic plant sciences in the region by bringing faculty and students together around invited national and international speakers conducting cutting-edge research, and to foster dialog and collaboration among organizers, attendees, and speakers. The theme of this symposium will address the growing field of plant signaling, ranging from cellular signal transduction to plant responses to biotic and abiotic environments. The symposium will consist of oral presentations by invited speakers, poster sessions by local and regional participants, and discussion sessions with invited speakers.
Broader impacts: The symposium attracts over 170 participants representing over 20 academic programs from local and regional institutions. The resources derived from this proposal will be used, in addition to cover a part of meeting expenses, to promote participation of regional junior scientists, namely undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and early-career faculty by defraying their traveling costs, and to digitally disseminate the symposium outcomes so that it will be available to a broader audience. Invitation of early career speakers and their interaction with participants should provide role models to junior scientists. Finally, interactions between research groups at this symposium, like past ones, will facilitate new collaborative and synergistic activities that should maximize productivities of current and future researchers.
MEPS symposium 2013- Plant Signaling Systems: From Cells to the Environment was held on May 15-16 in College Station, TX. The symposium hosted six national and international scientists as speakers, 6 invited graduate student and post-doc/early career faculty talks and included a poster session for graduate students and post-docs. The topic was chosen to appeal to a broad range of participants and focused on exciting recent developments in the field. The abstracts and video recordings of the conference were posted at http://meps2013.tamu.edu. The symposium attracted 177 scientists on-site, from 12 regional institutions. In addition, scientists from regional Agricultural Experiment Stations attended using remote streaming. Integration of basic and applied researchers at the meeting provided abundant opportunities for translating laboratory work into practical outcomes and for alerting applied researchers to current developments. Feedback from participants showed strong interest for future meetings. Participants particularly enjoyed the collaborative opportunities, the informal nature of the event, the speaker-graduate student luncheon, and the quality and diversity of the research presented, as well as the low attendance cost and travel support for graduate students. Suggested improvements included additional social events to improve opportunities for interactions, expanding the poster session, adding workshops with the speakers, as well as reducing time allotted per invited speaker.
