This award supports the symposium "Parasitic manipulation of host phenotype, or how to make a zombie", to be held at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference on 3-7 January 2014, in Austin, Texas. Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on the planet, so much so that nearly all animals are infected by parasites. Many parasites change the behaviors of the animals in which they live in ways that help the parasites. For example, one species of fungus makes ants it infects leave the ant colony, climb up to a leaf, clamp its jaws on a leaf, and stay there until the ant dies in just the right place for the fungus to spread its spores. This sort of ability to control a host far surpasses anything biologists have been able to achieve, so parasites may have much to teach us about how to change behaviors. This symposium will bring together twelve scientists from around the world to give presentations, with the goal of understanding how parasites can change the behavior of their hosts, and what the consequences of those behavioral changes might be. The symposium will help bring in expertise from outside of the field of parasitology (including behavioral ecologists, immunologists, neurobiologists, ecologists, invertebrate biologists, vertebrate biologists, and evolutionary biologists) to provide a more complete picture of how parasites manipulate their hosts. There are plans for a complementary workshop on parasite identification (geared towards students) and a poster session to the symposium, allowing others to present related findings. Papers from the symposium will be published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. Parasite manipulation is routinely featured in popular press, and science journalists are interested in covering this event.
Intellectual merit The symposium, "Parasitic Manipulation of Host Phenotype, or How to Make a Zombie" was held on 6 January 2014 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Austin, Texas. Eleven speakers from five countries were scheduled to give presentations. (One scheduled speaker was unable to attend due to flight cancellations caused by a polar vortex affecting northeastern North America at the time.) The symposium was well attended throughout the day. Additionally, there was a set of oral presentations (six talks) and poster presentations (two posters) that were complementary to the symposium. A workshop on parasite manipulation, featuring many speakers from the symposium, was held on the evening of the symposium to provide training and professional development for researchers. Following the symposium, thirteen papers were published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology (Volume 54, number 2, published July 2014). An image from one of the papers was featured on the cover. The collection of papers provides a snapshot of the current state of research on parasites, and outlines useful directions for future research. Broader impacts To help make the presentations more accessible to those not able to attend the SICB meeting, the co-organizers, Zen Faulkes and Kelly Weinersmith (@DoctorZen and @FuSchmu on Twitter, respectively), tweeted notes from the presentations using the #SICB hashtag. The symposium was featured in a news article in the journal Science (Pennisi E. 2014. Parasitic puppeteers begin to yield their secrets. Science 343(6168): 239. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.343.6168.239). Some the resulting papers in Integrative and Comparative Biology were published open access, so they can be read by anyone with an internet connection. The symposium, and papers based on work at the symposium, featured research by very early career scientists. One of the Integrative and Comparative Biology papers arising from the symposium was co-authored by an Hispanic female undergraduate, and two papers were co-authored by female students who performed the work in the paper while still in high school.
