General Information

Structural Birth Defects Trainee Symposium
Virtual
November 2, 2021 10 AM - 6 PM ET

The 12th Structural Birth Defects meeting will no longer be held in-person November 2-5, 2021 at the Bethesda Marriott in Bethesda, MD. In lieu of the full 12th Structural Birth Defects meeting, but in keeping with the tradition of fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, we have organized a one-day trainee symposium to be held November 2, 2021.  It will bring together structural birth defects researchers spanning the scientific spectrum from basic to clinical to translational, including developmental biologists, cell biologist, biophysicists, clinicians, genomicists, geneticists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians and bioinformaticists.

The Structural Birth Defects Trainee Symposium will welcome trainees and their mentors among grantees funded through the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Structural Birth Defects Initiative at the National Institutes of Health as well as trainees and mentors among all investigators in the birth defects research community. The symposium will also be open to other interested registrants and will provide a unique opportunity to hear the latest research on the etiology and development of structural birth defects.

Presentations will consist of short talks based on hypothesis driven findings that will be selected from submitted abstracts. In addition, there will be a welcoming address by the NICHD Director, Dr. Diana Bianchi, and two keynote addresses from Dr. Nadav Ahituv of the University of California, San Francisco, and Dr. Michael Gambello of Emory University.

All previous registrants of the in-person 12th Structural Birth Defects Meeting will receive full refunds.  Previous registrants who wish to attend the Trainee Symposium will need to re-register. Trainees who previously submitted an abstract for the in-person meeting should re-submit their abstract for short talk consideration in the symposium. All hotel reservations will need to be cancelled directly with the Bethesda Marriott.

Keynote Speakers:
Nadav Ahituv, Ph.D., Professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California, San Francisco. Lecture topic: “Functional characterization and therapeutic targeting of gene regulatory elements”

Michael Gambello, M.D., Ph,D., Professor of Human Genetics and Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine. Lecture topic: “A paradigm for translational medicine: Manipulation of the mTORC1 pathway to treat tuberous sclerosis complex”

Steering Committee:  Yalda Afshar, MD, PhD , University of California, Los Angeles; Elizabeth Bhoj, PhD, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; Rebecca Burdine, PhD, Princeton University; Daniel Cohn, PhD, University of California, Los Angeles; Nele Haelterman, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine; Mustafa Khokha, M D, Yale University; Wendy Nembhard, PhD, MPH, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences; Rolf Stottmann, PhD, Nationwide Children’s Hospital; Irene Zohn, PhD, Children’s National Medical Center