Genes, Brain & Behavior 14th Annual Meeting Information

The 14th Annual Meeting will take place May 15-19, 2012 in Boulder, Colorado at the Millennium Harvest House.

The program for the meeting can be downloaded here.

Registration Fees:

Click here to register for the 14th Annual Meeting.

Note: Non-Member prices are greater than an IBANGS membership plus meeting registration fees.

Become a member here!  

Registration fee reimbursement:  Registration fees (minus a $65 non-refundable portion) may be reimbursed until April 15, 2012. 

After this date fees will not be reimbursed.

A flyer for the meeting can be downloaded here.

A pre-meeting workshop on epigenetics will be held May 15th.  Information on the workshop can be downloaded here.  Click here to register  for the pre-meeting workshop.

Local organizers: Marissa Ehringer [[email protected]] and Jerry Stitzel

Program committee: Jerry Stitzel [Chair, [email protected]], Igor Branchi, Mary-Anne Enoch, Robert Gerlai, Kyung-An Han, Chris Janus

Plenary speakers:

Dr. Marla B. Sokolowski (University of Toronto)

Dr. Sokolowski received her BSc (1977) and PhD (1981) from the University of Toronto and began her academic career at York University (1982-1999) until she returned to University of Toronto in 1999. Her innovative work is esteemed worldwide as a clear, integrative mechanistic paragon of the manner in which genes can interact with the environment, thus impacting behaviour. She has trail-blazed the development of a branch of Behaviour Genetics that addresses the genetic and molecular bases of natural individual differences in behaviour and is best known for her discovery of the foraging gene. She has well over 130 publications and 150 invited lectures. Prof. Sokolowski is an award winning teacher and highly accomplished lecturer. She has supervised over 20 postdoctoral fellows and 30 graduate students with many of her trainees ascending to prestigious national and international academic positions. She has received Distinguished Visiting Professorships in the US and Europe where she contributes regularly to graduate education. Her early awards include the Dobzansky Memorial Award, NSERC University Research Fellowship, Genetics Society of Canada Young Scientist Award and a Human Frontier Sciences International Collaborative Research Grant. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998 for her pioneering work in the field of Behavioural Genetics and received a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Genetics and Behavioural Neurology in 2001. In 2004 she became a Fellow of Massey College and in 2007 she received the Genetics Society of Canada’s Award of Excellence. She co-directs the Experience Based Brain and Biological Development Programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research where she is the Weston Fellow. Most recently she was named a University Professor at University of Toronto and was appointed the Director of the Life Sciences Division of the Academy of Sciences of the Royal Society of Canada.  

Dr. Lisa M. Monteggia (UT Southwestern Medical Center)

Dr. Monteggia’s research interests focus on the molecular and cellular basis of neural plasticity as it pertains to psychiatric disorders. She utilizes molecular, cellular, behavioral, biochemical and electrophysiological approaches to elucidate how specific genes may contribute to psychiatric disorders, specifically focusing on better understanding Depression and Rett Syndrome/Autism. Dr. Monteggia is the Ginny and John Eulich Professor in Autism Spectrum Disorders, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She has worked at UT Southwestern since 2002, when she began as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Psychiatry Department at Yale University School of Medicine from 1998-2000, and from 1991-1998 worked as a neuroscientist at Abbott Laboratories in Illinois. She has served as an editor of numerous journals, including Biological Psychiatry and Neuropsychopharmacology, and on advisory and review boards benefiting research for Autism Investigators Now at UT Southwestern and the International Rett Syndrome Foundation. She has received several awards for her research, including Young Investigator Awards from NARSAD and the National Alliance for Autism Research, the Daniel X. Freedman Award for outstanding basic research achievement from NARSAD, and the International Mental Health Research Organization (IMHRO) Rising Star Basic Research Award.

Dr. Joe Z. Tsien is Co-Director of the Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute at Georgia Health Sciences University, and the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Cognitive and Systems Neurobiology and professor in Neurology.  Dr. Joe Z. Tsien is a prominent leader in elucidating the molecular and neural mechanisms of learning and memory in the mammalian brain.  He is a pioneer in the development of Cre/loxP-mediated conditional gene knockout techniques (Tsien et al., Cell 1996a&b) which are widely used in biomedical research.  For the neuroscience community, his Cre/loxP-mediated genetic methods have not only allowed neuroscientists to study gene functions in a specific brain region during behaviors, but also extended its utility with Channelrhodopsins-based optogenetics to further define neuron types and fine details in these neural circuits.  His many contributions over the past two decades have greatly advanced our understanding of the dynamical mechanisms by which memories are acquired, consolidated, and stored in the brain (Tsien, Scientific American, 2000; Shimizu et al. Science, 2000; Cui et al., Neuron, 2004). Dr. Tsien is also known as the creator of Doogie mouse through which he discovered and demonstrated the NR2B gene as the key subunit of the NMDA receptors for gating memory enhancement (Tang et al., Nature, 1999).  In addition, he is the first one to discover the link between an Alzheimer’s mutation and adult neurogenesis impairment (Feng et al., Neuron, 2001).  More recently, he has developed large-scale neural ensemble recording and decoding techniques that have led to the amazing discovery of the cell assembly organizing principles in the hippocampus (Tsien, Scientific American, 2007), subsequently decoding real-time associative memory traces in the brain (Chen et al. PLOS, 2009).  His laboratory continues to make important contribution to neurogenetics, including the discovering a molecular means to rapidly erase memory (Cao et al., Neuron, 2008) and the dopaminergic neuron NMDA receptor in controlling habit formation (Wang et al, Neuron, 2011).

Click here for "The Top 5 Things You Just Gotta Do in Boulder" from the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau

Policies for sponsors/exhibitors can be downloaded here