8th LASDB Meeting Held in São Paulo, Brazil

By Ida Chow

The 8th meeting of the Latin American Society for Developmental Biology was held October 20-23, 2015 in the largest Latin American port city of Santos, State of São Paulo, Brazil. The meeting was sponsored in part by the Society for Developmental Biology through a Non-SDB Meetings Grant.  SDB also sponsored an education workshop, Genomic Analysis and Editing through a Non-SDB Education Activities Grant. This mini workshop was held in place of the Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute Short Course due to the National Science Foundation PASI program currently being under review. 

On the last day of the conference, I led a workshop on International Collaboration in Developmental Biology. The goal of the workshop was to highlight the personal perspectives of scientists who participate in international collaboration and to provide a list of potential funding opportunities for scientists wishing to establish collaborations beyond their national borders. This list can be found on the SDB website here. One of the funding agencies, FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo), sent a representative to talk about their international programs and respond to questions.

The top four winners of the LASDB Best Student Poster Competition received travel awards to the 75th SDB Annual Meeting to be held August 4-8, 2016 in Boston, MA. 

The first and second prize winners were awarded the SDB Latin American-Caribbean Scholarship, a $2000 travel award.  Dalmiro Blanco Obregón of Fundación Instituto Leloir in Argentina won first place for his poster "Drosophila larval hematopoietic organ as a useful model to study blood cell differentiation." Second place went to Maira Arruda Cardoso of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil for her poster, "Quantitative aspects of NFΚB activity in Drosophila melanogaster DV patterning."

Third and fourth place winners were awarded a $1500 travel award from genesis.  Miguel Salinas-Saavedra of the University of Florida won third place for his poster, "The molecular evolution of tissue polarity: insights from early embryogenesis of Nematostella vectensis."  The fourth place winner was Marina Elisa Singarete of the University of São Paulo in Brazil for her poster, "Molecular evolution of Hoxa13 in snakes: implications of five nucleotide mutations for specific developmental pathways."

Danilo Predes da Cunha of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil received an honorable mention and a bag of goodies from the meeting sponsors for his poster, "The natural compound A7 synergistically activates Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway." 

The next LASDB meeting will be held in 2017 in Colombia.