Wednesday, October 16, 2019, 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm (reception to follow)
NIH Clinical Center (Building 10), Masur Auditorium
The next presentation in the NIH's Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series (WALS) will be given by Miguel A. Nicolelis, M.D., Ph.D. Dr. Nicolelis has dedicated his career to investigating how the brains of freely behaving animals encode sensory and motor information. As a result of his studies, Dr. Nicolelis was first to propose and demonstrate that animals and human subjects can utilize their electrical brain activity to directly control neuroprosthetic devices via brain-machine interfaces (BMI). Dr. Nicolelis’ pioneering BMI studies have become extremely influential since they offer potential new therapies for patients suffering from severe levels of paralysis, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy.
Dr. Nicolelis is the Duke School of Medicine Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience at Duke University, Professor of Neurobiology, Biomedical Engineering, Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychology and Neuroscience, and founder of Duke's Center for Neuroengineering. He is Founder and Scientific Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute for Neuroscience of Natal. Dr. Nicolelis is also founder of the Walk Again Project, an international consortium of scientists and engineers, dedicated to the development of an exoskeleton device to assist severely paralyzed patients in regaining full body mobility.
Thursday, October 17, 2019 to Friday, October 18, 2019 (registration required)
NIH Clinical Center (Building 10), Masur Auditorium
Sponsored by the National Cancer Institute's Center of Excellence in Immunology, this two-day national symposium addresses recent advances in the scientific understanding of cancer and inflammation. Main topics include network science in cancer immunology; unconventional T cells and innate lymphocytes; antigen presentation and antigen presenting cells; and the relationship between the microbiome and cancer. Registration will close on October 4.
Follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #NCICancerInflamm2019.
Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm (reception to follow)
NIH Clinical Center (Building 10), Masur Auditorium
This installment in the NIH's Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series (WALS) features Christina D. Smolke, Ph.D., Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University.
Biosensors are key components in engineered biological systems that interface with the large biochemical space in living cells and their environment. Aptamers, functional nucleic acid molecules that bind ligands, provide a powerful sensing element for many classes of molecules of interest. Although procedures such as SELEX have been quite successful in generating individual aptamers that bind proteins, generating small molecule aptamers has been more challenging due to the need to chemically modify the ligand to permit the recovery of binding sequences. Dr. Smolke will introduce a new method for de novo rapid in vitro evolution of RNA biosensors (DRIVER) that enables multiplexed discovery of biosensors for unmodified ligands without immobilization. She will also showcase how DRIVER-selected biosensors can be used for a variety of applications, including gene expression control, enzyme evolution, closed-loop control systems of synthetic metabolic pathways, modulating viral infectivity, triggering CRISPR/Cas9 genome modification, and producing highly multiplexed diagnostic assays.
Monday, October 28, 2019 to Tuesday, October 29, 2019 (registration required)
NIH Clinical Center (Building 10), Masur Auditorium
This Special Conference on Tumor Metabolism, organized by the Liver Cancer Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Center for Cancer Research (CCR), will bring together experts in the multidisciplinary field of liver cancer to update on research progress and future directions, with a focus on tumor metabolism. The meeting will also foster collaboration and team science among various disciplines of liver cancer research including epidemiology and translational science.
Abstracts for consideration as poster presentations are welcome and due by 11:59 p.m. on June 28, 2019.
Monday, October 28, 2019 to Tuesday, October 29, 2019 (register by October 25)
NIH Clinical Center (Building 10), Lipsett Amphitheater
The NIH and the Japanese biomedical research communities have a long history of collaboration and cooperation on scientific matters. To further promote these mutually beneficial interactions and training activities, a joint NIH-Japan-JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) symposium will take place at the NIH Bethesda campus. The main theme of this symposium will be "inflammation," focusing on various aspects of inflammation research from NIH and Japan. A major goal of this symposium is to promote the career development of young scientists. NIH staff and trainees, as well as interested individuals from outside NIH, are invited to register and attend.
The symposium consists of four parts: (1) plenary sessions by prominent investigators, seven from NIH and eight from Japanese universities/institutes; (2) a special session related to the damage caused by the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake; (3) poster presentations by young scientists in one of the FAES classrooms in Building 10 on October 28; and (4) a career workshop in the NIDCR conference room in Building 30 on October 29. In 2017, we had a joint NIH-Japan-JSPS symposium in Sendai, Japan, to enhance ongoing recovery efforts in biomedical research in the areas affected by the Great Tohoku Earthquake. This year's symposium represents a continuation of this effort.
We will have a tour of the Clinical Center for scientists and students from Japan to introduce NIH and its mission as the biomedical research center in the US. Individuals interested in participating should contact a member of the organizing committee.
Monday, October 28, 2019 to Tuesday, October 29, 2019 (registration required)
NIH Natcher Conference Center (Building 45)
The Synthetic Biology Consortium was formed as a place for researchers and stakeholders interested in the synthetic biology field to interact and share ideas with each other, as well as to facilitate bringing synthetic biology research to NIH. The first annual Synthetic Biology Consortium Meeting will focus on the use of synthetic biology for developing technologies for biomedicine. The event will include breakout sessions for technical road-mapping; community building through poster and breakout sessions; networking with NIH Program Staff from different Institutes and Center; and a trainee-only session on the topic of grant/technical writing.
Registration for the event closes October 7th, 2019.
Gender, Race, and Power in Science
Thursday, October 31, 2019, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Lister Hill Center Auditorium, National Library of Medicine (NIH Building 38A)
In this lecture, British science journalist, broadcaster, and author Angela Saini will explore how prejudice can affect scientific research on race and gender and will describe her efforts to uncover manipulation of evidence, abuse, and wrongdoing by those in power. She will also address the inadvertent and inappropriate use of race by mainstream scientific researchers in health and genetics. Drawing from themes in her two most recent books, “Superior: The Return of Race Science” and “Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong," she will show why researchers need to be careful not to conflate social gender and racial disparities with biological differences. The lecture will be followed by a meet and greet.
Saini has a master’s degree in engineering from Oxford University and is a former MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has written for The Guardian, New Scientist, Wired, and Science, and she regularly presents science programs on the BBC.
Tuesday, November 5, 2019 (register by November 1)
NIH Clinical Center (Building 10), Lipsett Amphitheater
This meeting will focus on a relatively new concept in immunology: that there is an innate immune "memory." Speakers will cover many different aspects of this concept and many immune cell types will be presented as having an innate memory. Overall, the talks at this meeting may change how the innate immune response is thought of and studied.
Tuesday, November 5, 2019, 8:45 am to 2:30 pm (register by October 28)
John Edward Porter Neuroscience Research Center (NIH Building 35), Room 620/630
The DNA Sequencing and Genomics Core and the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Core at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the Molecular Genomics Core at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) are jointly hosting a one-day symposium focusing on long read sequencing technologies and applications. The symposium will feature presentations on basic and clinical research and data analysis, as well as technology innovation. We hope this symposium will increase awareness of new long read sequencing tools and promote their applications in translational and clinical research within NIH.
Thursday, November 14, 2019 to Friday, November 15, 2019 (registration required)
NIH Natcher Conference Center (Building 45), Ruth L. Kirschstein Auditorium
The mission of the Center of Excellence in Chromosome Biology (CECB) is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms involved in chromosome function; how aberrations in chromosomes and chromatin lead to disease; and how these defects can be corrected. Towards achieving that mission, this symposium brings together scientists in the fields of chromatin and chromosome biology, with the focus on stem cells, cell development, aging, and cancer. We hope this symposium offers you an opportunity to learn more about the current status of chromosome structure and function in development and disease, to share your research, and to discuss the use and implications of these advances for clinical applications.
The deadline to submit an abstract for poster presentations is October 18, 2019.
Online registration is free and open to all. The deadline to register is October 31, 2019.
Monday, November 18, 2019, 9:00 am to 1:00 pm (register by October 28)
NIH Clinical Center (Building 10), Lipsett Amphitheater
The Dr. Norman P. Salzman Memorial Fund was established in 1999 to present the annual Norman P. Salzman Memorial Symposium and Award in Virology to an outstanding Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Fellow, or Clinical Fellow working in the field of virology at the NIH, the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or the Leidos community. The Symposium and Award are hosted by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) and the NIH Virology Interest Group. The symposium highlights current research of eminent extramural and NIH intramural virologists.
The Fund was established by Dr. Salzman’s family, colleagues and friends to remember the legacy of this noted pioneer in molecular biology and respected member of the NIH research community. Dr. Salzman's career spanned 40 years in virology research and he was among the first to characterize viral mRNAs and to visualize replicating viral DNA. Dr. Salzman’s achievements in virology are paralleled by the recognition that his laboratory was a training ground for many young scientists, several of whom have went on to become important researchers on an international scale.
This is the top annual virology meeting at the NIH, with renowned invited speakers and a competition for outstanding research in virology among intramural NIH/CBER/Leidos postdocs, post-bac IRTAs, and graduate students for the prestigious Salzman Award.
Abstracts are due October 21, 2019. Registration closes October 28, 2019.
