Developmental biology is one of the most exciting areas of modern biology. This award will help fund the 2008 Santa Cruz Developmental Biology (SCDB) Meeting. SCDB meetings are international in scope but are also highly accessible to junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. The 2008 Meeting will be organized around the theme "Transitions in Development". The meeting will have 49 platform speakers, of which 21 will be chosen from abstracts submitted to the meeting organizers, allowing postdocs and graduate students ample opportunity to present their own data. Two poster sessions allow all other attendees to present their work. The 2008 SCDB Meeting will have a significant positive impact on the field of developmental biology, educating the ~200 participants in the latest advances in this exciting area, disseminating the results in a meeting report in a leading journal in the field, and fostering training for scientists in the early stages of their careers. Efforts will be made to attract a group of participants that represents the diversity of the field in organism studied and approach used that is balanced in gender, and that increases participation by underrepresented minorities. This award will help achieve this goal, by providing meeting associated registration and housing costs for eight graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, selected to increase the diversity of the participants, as well as registration and housing costs for four junior faculty members who will present talks.
