This R13 meetings grant application seeks partial support for three upcoming annual Alcohol and Immunology Research Interest Group (AIRIG) meetings in conjunction with either the Midwest Autumn Immunology Conference (AIC) in Chicago, IL, the Society for Leukocyte Biology (SLB), or Keystone Symposia. Funding is requested to cover travel costs and housing for students, postdoctoral fellows, junior faculty, and minority scientists, as well as some of the cost of invited speakers, for a one day meeting which will cover broad aspects of alcohol and immunology. The 2019 AIRIG meeting will be held in Boston, MA, on Friday November 15th in conjunction with the Annual Society for Leukocyte Biology (SLB) meeting. The topic will be ?Alcohol & Tissue-Specific Immunity? with a plan of coordinating activities with the precision medicine focus of the 2019 SLB meeting. This full-day AIRIG meeting will include 3 plenary sessions: 1) Clinical studies on alcohol and immunity, 2) Tissue-specific immunity in the lung & liver, and 3) Tissue-specific immunity in the gut & brain, along with posters and short presentations selected from submitted abstracts. We will hold the 2020 and 2021 AIRIG meetings at Loyola University Chicago (Loyola) and the University of Colorado Denver (UCDenver), respectively. Themes of the latter two meeting will be ?Alcohol, Inflammatory Responses and Tissue Injury? and ?Immune Modulation by Alcohol and Cannabis.? SLB meetings have between 300 - 500 registrants depending on the venue and if the meeting is solo or joint with other small scientific societies, including the International Endotoxin and Innate Immunity Society. The AIC is a regional meeting with an impressive list of invited plenary speakers and Keystone Symposia attract participants from across the country. Relevant to AIRIG, many of the Keystone Symposia have immunologic- or disease-based themes. Holding the AIRIG meeting with AIC, SLB, or a Keystone Symposium will allow greater visibility of alcohol and immunology research than would be possible at much larger meetings such as the American Association of Immunologists or Experimental Biology. Additionally, these meetings have numerous opportunities for young developing scientist to participate on many levels, including selecting a large number of oral presentations from submitted abstracts. In addition, these meetings have Career Development Programs, including sessions and workshops entitled Careers in Immunology, Women and Diversity, Grant Writing, Streets Smarts of Science for Students and Understanding the Individual Development Plan. These sessions allow time for career building and collaborative opportunities, which may not be feasible or readily available at larger meetings. Thus, in addition to providing a forum for the discussion of current research in the field, overall goals of the co-organizers are to expand the participation of students, postdoctoral trainees, and minority scientists and to increase the critical mass of scientists working on alcohol and immunology issues. We believe that these goals will be best achieved by scheduling upcoming AIRIG meetings in conjunction with the AIC, SLB or Keystone Symposia.
There are a limited number of laboratories working in the field of alcohol and immunology, all of which benefit from the AIRIG meetings, as the meetings provide a forum for maintaining an open dialog between these research groups. The meetings are intended to be inclusive: 1) bringing research groups together to foster communication and collaboration, 2) allowing junior scientists and those who are new to the field to present their work orally, and 3) introducing alcohol trainees to senior alcohol research faculty who may be able to serve as future mentors to the trainees. The organizers feel that meeting in a friendly, non-competitive setting increases the potential for rapid scientific advancement and may help to keep alcohol and immunology trainees in the field by availing them of the opportunity to meet funded senior faculty and their trainees.
