One of the best parts of a new idea is being able to share it! Research is certainly no exception. On Thursday, April 30th, the postbacs of NIH will be sharing their ideas and findings at Postbac Poster Day.
For the junior scientist, the poster session is a rite of passage, an opportunity to think about the big picture, and an exercise in communicating your work to a broad audience.
The NIH Research Festival always has a strong theme running through it, from “Bench-to-Bedside” in 2002 and “Chromosomes in Modern Biology and Medicine” in 2007 to “The NIH at 125: Today's Discoveries, Tomorrow's Cures” in 2012. The year 2014 was no different, but it marked the first time that the Festival was focused on a single organ within the human body: the brain.
Let’s start with some numbers: 30,000 neuroscientists, five days, and 20 pages of notes. It all adds up to a week well spent at the recent Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference in Washington, D.C. Researchers from around the world, many from the NIH IRP, descended on the Washington Convention Center to share their most recent research, discoveries, thoughts, and future ideas.
No need to stand in the cold for a glimpse of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade when you can see it at the NIH Clinical Center! Want to go to space and have a look at the Apollo capsule? It’s here, too. Starting in 2004, the NIH Clinical Center has presented a wonderful annual display of gingerbread houses built by teams of NIH staff.
Recently, more than a dozen of our Institutes and Centers (ICs) came together to tell a story of interconnected, cross-discipline science at one of the largest medical meetings in the world, the 31,000-attendee-strong Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.
The NIH Research Festival this year was themed “The Era of the Brain,” so Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director, began the plenary session by highlighting the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies). The President’s initiative has been the talk of the town recently and, thanks to some hard work by the leaders at the NIH, has now been transformed into a 12-year scientific vision.
Walking around the NIH’s Bethesda Research Campus is a stimulating experience on any day. The cluster of National Institutes and Centers (ICs) within a 1.5-mile radius is a hive of activity, with researchers walking and talking as they move from building to building to use centralized resources, meet with collaborators, or learn the latest in techniques and news from the other ICs.