This U13 proposal requests funding to support a 2-day conference entitled """"""""Transdisciplinary Approaches to Mechanisms of Behavior Change in Alcohol: Facilitating Research across Disciplines and Institutions"""""""" The conference is designed to take a next step in efforts to foster Mechanisms of Behavior Change (MOBC) research in the alcohol field. The conference will focus on emerging cross disciplinary knowledge about reward systems and the neurophysiology of emotional regulation in the domains of cognitive science, brain imaging, and genetics and how this new knowledge could inform alcohol treatment and prevention research. In addition, the conference will address the challenges of conducting MOBC alcohol research across disciplines and institutions. The targeted audience will be alcohol researchers working in the basic and clinical areas above who could contribute to transdisciplinary MOBC research, but currently are not positioned to do so. The proposed one-time conference will be held early in the summer of 2008. The location, New York City, is selected because it is an accessible and attractive location for travel, and leverages substantial in-kind logistic support available from Columbia University. The application describes plan to publish conference proceedings in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal that has wide dissemination to the alcohol research community. In addition, we propose several methods to assess whether the conference achieves its aims. ? ? ?
