Now’s the time to arrange your October schedule around CurePSP‘s annual International Scientific Symposium.  The proceedings will be dawn to dusk on Saturday, October 18, 2014 in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins’ Mt. Washington Conference Center.  As usual, I’m privileged to be its scientific director and master of ceremonies.

As always for this shindig, the technical level will be very high, with scientists talking to scientists.  No lay-language summaries. There’s always time for everyone to contribute ad libitum during the ample discussion periods.  A lot of the meeting’s material is unpublished and it’s a great place to form new ideas and collaborations.

The agenda has two categories of speakers: recent CurePSP grantees presenting the results of their funded work completed within the past year; and internationally-known authorities describing the state of the art in their own areas.  This year, the grantees are Diana Apetauerova, Nilufer Ertekin-Taner, Stuart Feinstein, Pau Pastor, Michael Wolfe and Benjamin Wolozin .  The invited speakers are Adam Boxer, Günter Höglinger, Virginia Lee and John Trojanowski.  As always, Dennis Dickson will update the group on the operations of CurePSP’s brain bank, which he directs, and on the projects of his arising from that collection.  There will also be a few posters, with brief, live presentations by those PIs.

But perhaps the star attraction will be Jerry Schellenberg presenting the preliminary results of his much-anticipated whole-exome sequencing project in PSP.  We have reserved a large chunk of the schedule for his talk and for talks by a number of experts in the most promising genes identified by the WES.

Registration is free!  (but required) If you’re a student (medical or grad or other), fellow (clinical or research) or resident (neurology or other), CurePSP offers travel scholarships  Breakfast and lunch will be provided to all registrants.  I’ll post the exact schedule as soon as I can, but you can assume that the first speaker will start at about 7:45 AM and that we’ll all head for the nearest bar at about 5:00.

Poster submissions are welcome.  Please submit them by September 5 to abantum@curepsp.org with a copy to me (golbe@rutgers.edu).  I’ll have a decision for you by Sept. 10.

For more information, go to http://www.psp.org/research/researchers/symposium.html