A decade ago ecological genomics was a field in its infancy. The field was created to develop a comprehensive understanding of the genetic mechanisms that organisms use to respond to changing ecological and environmental conditions at the genome-wide scale. During the last ten years ecological genomics has grown into a productive discipline that thrives via novel interdisciplinary research that integrates the fields of ecology, evolution, genomics, and physiology to address fundamental questions at the mechanistic level.
This meeting award aids the advancement of the field ecological genomics through support of the tenth annual Ecological Genomics Symposium to be hosted by the Kansas State University, Ecological Genomics Institute from the 26th to the 28th of October 2012 at the Marriot Hotel on the Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. The Tenth Annual Ecological Genomics Symposium will accomplish two primary goals. First, this symposium provides the only annual forum for the dissemination of the rapidly advancing and diverse research in ecological genomics in the world and thus it will continue to accomplish this goal. Second, since this is the tenth annual symposium, this meeting will also allow participants to reflect on the developments of the last decade, as well as chart the path forward for the field. Thus, this symposium provides an essential venue for exchanging scientific information from diverse disciplines and fostering novel research directions for the field. The project will specifically support travel and lodging costs for eleven domestic speakers and ten student/postdoctoral fellowships. The speakers include both established and emerging leaders of the field that is both scientifically and culturally diverse. The travel fellowships will support young scientists working in ecological genomics. These fellowships will be targeted to support individuals from historically underrepresented groups in science. The meeting is designed around a single set of non-overlapping invited talks over a two-day period affording ample opportunity to cultivate interactions among the participants.
This award partially supported the 10th Annual Ecological Genomics Symposium, which took place from the 26th to the 28th of October 2012 in Kansas City, Missouri. The field of Ecological Genomics seeks to identify and characterize the genes and genetic mechanisms that underlie organismal responses to their natural environments. Ecological Genomics is a relatively new field that is rapidly expanding through the development of new, affordable, and high-throughput genomic and sequencing technologies that are allowing researchers to determine the mechanistic basis of organismal responses to the environment. Since the field was a little more than a decade ago, ecological genomics has been a highly integrative field drawing on the previously disparate fields of ecology, molecular genetics, bioinformatics, and physiology. These fields are now successfully integrated and the field is continuing to become more multidisciplinary. These interactions are facilitated and promoted by the annual ecological genomics symposium that was be funded by this proposal. Using the funds in this award and matching from Kansas State University and registration fees, The Ecological Genomics Institute successfully hosted The 10th Annual Ecological Genomics Symposium. The 10th annual symposium attracted nearly 150 attendees and featured invited presentations from 14 invited speakers. This meeting is the only annual forum for the dissemination of new findings in ecological genomics and at the 10th annual meeting each speaker provided some synthesis of where the field had been, where is currently was, and where it would be in another decade. Additional information about the attendees and the invited speakers can be found at http://ecogen.ksu.edu/symp2012/. All of the the goals of this award were all accomplished. They included: 1. organizing and hosting the 10th Annual Ecological Genomics Symposium to keep pace with the rate of scientific discovery in the field, 2. promoting the field of ecological genomics by providing an annual and a 10-year anniversary venue to reflect on a decade of success, disseminate current research discoveries, and determine the path forward for the field of ecological genomics, and 3. increasing diversity in the field by actively recruiting students and postdocs to the meeting by providing student travel fellowships. The primary intellectual merit activity of this proposal was to partially support the meeting and facilitate the dissemination of new findings in the field via the support of this meeting. This was a fantastic success, the meeting occured over a 2.5 day period and stimulated many discussions about the future directions in the field. Although the award did not support the entire meeting it did support a portion of the travel and lodging costs of the diverse set of invited speakers. The primary broader impact of the award was our ability to support 22 undergraduate, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellow travel awards. These were partial travel awards, but the awards were an amazing success in increasing the scientific, gender, and cultural diversity of the meetings.
