All meetings & conferences

2012 Claremont International Jain Conference: Bioethics: Religious and Spiritual Approaches

Cosponsored by Claremont Lincoln University, the International School for Jain Studies, Jain Center of Southern California, and the Federation of Jain Associations in North America (JAINA)

Bioethics: Religious and Spiritual Approaches

August 24-25, 2012 Claremont, California

The rapid growth of the medical sciences and of medical technologies has given doctors the ability to diagnose and to cure as never before. At the same time, these breakthroughs raise perplexing ethical questions: when does life begin, and when does it end? When is the quality of life so compromised that doctors should cease further interventions? What is informed consent? What constraints should apply to research on human subjects? And, above all, how can the sanctity of life be preserved? This conference will bring the resources of Jainism (see note below), of the dharma traditions of India, and of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions in general to bear on the most difficult bioethical questions of our day.

Conference Details

Plenary sessions take place in Mudd Auditorium, Claremont Lincoln University, 1325 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. There is an inexpensive registration fee and a discount for students.Early registration at a reduced rate will close on July 15th.

The conference hotel is the Claremont DoubleTree, 555 W. Foothill Blvd. in Claremont; (909) 626-2411. Other accommodations can be found at Hotel Claremont (909) 621-4831. Claremont is 15 minutes from the Ontario International Airport.

Note on Jainism:

Jainism is one of the oldest religions originating from India. At the very heart of Jainism is the ethic of non-violence, Ahimsa , which means ‘Respect for all living beings.’ Ahimsa continues to guide the daily lives of all Jains, who are vegetarians, and practice ecology and conservation. Out of 14 million Jains in the world, 125,000 are settled in North America. The other two tenets of Jainsim are non-absolutism, which means that real truth has multiple facets, and non-possessiveness, which means that one should balance one’s needs and desires. JAINA is the umbrella organization of nearly 70 Jain centers and congregations in North America, that has Special Consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.

Organizing Committee:

Matthew Fisher, Coordinator
Dr. Manoj Jain
Dr. Nitin Shah
Manish Mehta, Ph.D.
Rajen Dhami

8th International Summer Conference: Research in Forensic Psychiatry

5th to 6th July 2012, in Regensburg, Germany

The annual Summer Conference in Regensburg (Germany) is an international conference on topics of the Forensic Psychiatry. The following topics are addressed: prediction of dangerousness and recidivism, offender treatment, crime scene analysis and investigative psychology, risk assessment and risk management, forensic child and juvenile psychiatry, psychopathy: concepts and research, and forensic neurobiology and neuroimaging.

For further information visit the conference website or contact Ms Simone Schwabenbauer at simone.schwabenbauer@medbo.de

13th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2012)

The 13th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2012) will take place July 13-14, 2012, in Long Beach, CA, right before ISMB 2012.

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development within the biological research community.

Open Source software has flourished in the bioinformatics community for well over a decade. When the first BOSC (Bioinformatics Open Source Conference) was held in 2000, there were already a number of popular open source bioinformatics packages, and the number and range of these projects has increased dramatically since then. Many open source bioinformatics packages are widely used by the research community across a wide variety of applications. Open source bioinformatics software has facilitated rapid innovation, dissemination, and wide adoption of new computational methods, reusable software components, and standards.

BOSC brings together bioinformatics open source developers from all over the world so they can forge connections each other (both within and across projects), increase the visibility of their work, and collaborate to build shared resources. Participants can work together to create use cases, prototype working code, or run hands-on tutorials in new software packages and emerging technologies. For those who are bioinformatics software users rather than developers, BOSC introduces or updates them on a wide array of projects that they might find useful.

Sessions

Cloud and Parallel Computing -- This session will cover cloud-based approaches to improving software and data accessibility. The emergence of cloud computing has made highly scalable cluster computing available to computational biologists. Services such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud combined with publicly available datasets promise to lower the overhead to participate in large scale data analyses. Talks will focus on how the community can build up resources, datasets, and workflows for making the best use of cloud infrastructure. We will also include talks on data-parallel approaches to analyzing massive data sets, such as those resulting from next-generation sequencing and mass spec proteomics, and reports on the parallelization of bioinformatics algorithms in general.

Linked Data -- Linked Data is an emerging set of conventions on using basic Semantic Web standards (HTTP URIs and RDF in particular) to expose, share, and connect data, information, and knowledge online. Linked Data principles are increasingly being embraced by bioinformatics resources. For example, UniProt is now being made fully available in RDF , and collaborative initiatives such as Bio2RDF aim to expose many commonly used database resources to data integration through RDF and its query language, SPARQL. This session is devoted to reports on software that works with such new data stores, or aids in their development, including technologies for interoperable web services, and tools for ontology building or maintenance.

Genome-scale Data Management -- This session will focus on processes and technologies that support the creating, managing and reporting of genomic data. This session is appropriate for discussion of systems that involve components such as (but not limited to) Ensembl and GMOD/Chado data stores, Taverna and Galaxy analysis workflows, and BioMart and InterMine warehouses.

Data Visualization and Imaging -- This session will address visualization techniques and tools that provide insight into large and highly complex biomedical data sets , as well as biological image processing, analysis and data management. Talks that address the development of frameworks and communities are particularly welcome.

Translational Bioinformatics -- This session will explore applications of biological and medical informatics to the development of personalized healthcare, therapies, and a better understanding of human health and disease. Topics include the analysis of human microarray and other 'omics data, bioinformatics methodologies for clinical research, and tools for discovering clinically useful associations in human databases.

Bioinformatics Open Source Project Updates -- This session will feature short talks from ongoing projects describing their recent progress. Abstracts will be solicited from open source projects affiliated with the O|B|F (see http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Projects), including the Bio projects, DAS, BioMOBY, EMBOSS, and GMOD, but any other open-source project will be equally eligible to submit presentations for this session.

Panel: Interfacing with Industry -- Companies are more and more seeing the benefits of working with open source code and making their own code open; meanwhile, academics frequently partner with companies on their research projects. We encourage submissions from companies that work with open source software, as well as developers from non-commercial organizations who collaborate with companies. We anticipate a broadly useful conversation about the benefits and pitfalls of academic/commercial interaction.

2012 HIV Diagnostics Conference

December 12-14, 2012 Atlanta, Georgia

The 2012 HIV Diagnostics Conference, co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), provides an opportunity for clinicians, clinical and public health laboratorians, HIV/AIDS program managers and directors, and industry representatives to review developments in HIV diagnostics, share data and research findings, and establish collaborations. Since its inception in 2005, the HIV Diagnostics Conference has served as an opportunity for those interested in issues related to HIV diagnostic testing to gather and discuss new developments and related prevention and surveillance measures.

At the 2010 HIV Diagnostics Conference, a new HIV-1/2 diagnostic testing algorithm was proposed. The 2012 HIV Diagnostics Conference will provide an opportunity for participants to share their experiences with 4th generation antigen/antibody assays and data generated with this new HIV-1/2 diagnostic testing algorithm. The 2012 conference will be held December 12-14 at the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel in Atlanta, GA. Online registration will open in February. The registration fee is $350. Registration, abstract submission and proceedings from past conferences can be accessed online. A limited number of scholarships are available to provide partial support for potential conference attendees who would otherwise be unable to participate.

A preconference workshop (included in the registration fee) will be held December 11 for interested program and laboratory personnel. Topics to be reviewed include HIV-related test principles, specimen selection and handling, measures of test performance, and understanding test kit product inserts. The HIV Diagnostic Conference Planning Committee actively encourages manufacturers of HIV diagnostic and prognostic assays or devices to participate in our Exhibitor Sessions and to contribute to the scientific discussion throughout the conference.

Whole Grains Summit

The next Whole Grains Summit is scheduled for May 19-22, 2012 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As with past international Whole Grains Summits in Porvoo, Finland (2001), Minneapolis, Minnesota (2005), and New Castle, England (2009), the 2012 Whole Grain Summit is an event to convene scientist, business, and health professionals from around the world to examine where we’ve been and where we’re going in the area of research on whole grains, dietary fiber and functional grain components. This is an effort to bring together the various sectors and disciplines focusing on grain-based foods not only from the science and technology perspective, but also from the business, marketing, and regulatory perspectives. It is the organizers goal that outcomes from this event will address issues needed to allow healthier grain-based foods to more readily flow into the supply chain for easier access by the consumer.

The grain community has responded well to this research by increasing the use of healthy whole grain and fiber ingredients in grain products. This Whole Grain Summit will explore approaches for next steps in creating a healthier grain-based food supply. With the release of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the committee called for everyone to take a lead in creating a healthful food environment, making the healthy choice, the easy choice. Our goal is to frame the development, delivery, and enhanced consumption of healthy grain-based foods within the economic realities of business and consumer preference.

The Whole Grains Summit 2012 is designed to provide an opportunity for you to bring your voice and to share your view of the research, regulatory, and/or consumer landscape as it relates to whole grains. Don’t miss this opportunity to share your knowledge, expertise, and experience. We all have much to learn from one another as- all of us knows more than any of us.

For program information please contact:

Denise Hauge
952-500-9012
ottxx064@umn.edu

For registration information please contact:
Nicole Freese
612-624-3708 or
Kristi Fischer
612-625-4265
cceconf5@umn.edu

International Symposium on Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics ISOPT Clinical 2013

March 7-10, 2013 Paris, France

ISOPT will reconvene in Paris March 7 – 10 for our 10th symposium. Over the years, ISOPT has repeatedly shaped its form so it can accommodate to provide a collaborative atmosphere for clinicians, clinical trialists, pharma industry and regulatory officers. Our formed vision has been to increase knowledge and awareness of drug usage in ophthalmology reflecting innovations and their utilization in practice. In order to achieve this vision ISOPT is set to implement the following missions:

Educate via updating and sharing current and evolving treatment algorithms for practitioners.

Connect data arising from clinical studies to actual daily practice.

Facilitate innovation via panels and discussions of early and late “development related topics”.

We invite you to join us in Paris, and become a part of ISOPT, bring your own experience and insights of treating your patients, be exposed to the last two year clinical experience gained in major industry supported studies and be part of the efforts to reflect scientific data to clinical reality and patient care.

ISOPT has become famous for its informal atmosphere and the ability to meet experts and faculty leaders for “out of the lecture hall” discussions.

Whether your field of interest is in retinal diseases, inflammation, cornea and external diseases, glaucoma or basic science you may contribute and be part of the ISOPT spirit.

Focused Update in Medical Management

Retina

Dry AMD

Wet AMD

Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic Macular Edema

Retinal Vein Occlusion

Retinal Degeneration

Devices & Drug Delivery

Inflammation & Infection
Allergic Conjunctivitis

Treatment Updates

Clinical Studies for Uveitis

Cases Presentation

Ocular Infections

Basic Science

Therapy of Neovascularization

Inhibition of Diabetic Retinopathy

Antioxidants and Nutrition

Vascular Targets

Gene Therapy

Glaucoma

Conventional & Potential Glaucoma Therapy

Glaucoma Therapy & Ocular Surface

Inraocular Pressure & Glaucoma

Blood Flow & Glaucoma

External Eye Diseases
Dry Eye Treatment Innovations

Dry Eye-Ocular Surface Clinical Trials

Wound Healing

External Eye Diseases

Anterior Segment Imaging

Devices

Drug Development

Drug Delivery

Imaging

Toxicology

Nano Technology

Regulation of Ophthalmic Products

Ethics

A platform for informal communication with experts in drug development

Symposium Secretariat

Paragon Conventions
18, Avenue Louis-Casai
1209 Geneva, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0)22 5330 948
Fax: +41 (0)22 5802 953
Email: isopt@isopt.net

2012 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Spinal Cord Injury Professionals

September 3-5, 2012 Las Vegas, Nevada

Annual Meeting Theme: Beyond Boundaries

The 2012 Annual Meeting will focus on cutting edge and innovative strategies to promote and achieve successful outcomes following SCI/D. It is essential for the professionals working in SCI/D to stay current with recent advances and technology. This conference will provide a venue to promote optimal quality of life as it relates to SCI/D medicine and rehabilitation.

Educational topic categories include:

• Basic Science/ Bench to Bedside
• Changing demographics and etiologies in SCI
• Non-traumatic SCI/D
• SCI Across the Lifespan (Pediatrics, Veterans, Aging population)
• Participation/ Adapted Sports and Recreation
• Violence/ Abuse after Spinal Cord Injury
• Other

Target Audience
The Academy’s Annual Meeting includes healthcare professionals representing a variety of specialties involved in the management of spinal cord injury/disorder (SCI/D). Professionals attending include, but are not limited to: physicians, basic scientists and clinical researchers, physician assistants, nurses, psychologists, social workers, rehabilitation counselors, physical and occupational therapists, as well as residents, fellows, and students from various professions.

Questions/Contact information: Joan McMahon, MSA, BSN, joan.academyscipro2012@gmail.com or Amy Cheatham, MS, acheatham@firminc.com.

28th Annual Pediatric Nursing Conference

The 28th Annual Pediatric Nursing Conference will be held July 19-21, 2012, at the Westin Boston Waterfront in Boston, Masachusetts.

Third Annual International Pediatric Antimicrobial Stewardship Conference

Sponsored by Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society

May 31 - June 1, 2012 Kansas City, Missouri

Meeting Topics

May 31st

Nuts and bolts: Initiation and implementation of an Antimicrobial Stewardship Program (ASP)

June 1st

Stewardship strategies in the outpatient setting
Empiric disease specific antimicrobial utilization
Utilization of microbiology laboratory data to guide ASP decisions
International efforts involving ASPs
Useful Strategies for inpatient antimicrobial stewardship
ASP evaluation and outcome metrics

Learning Objectives

At the completion of the course, healthcare professionals will be able to:

Implement and evaluate a pediatric ASP
Understand the importance of Pediatric ASPs on a global scale
Identify strategies to improve outpatient antibiotic use
Design evaluation strategies for your ASP
Identify barriers to and potential stategies to optimize ASP outcomes

Meeting Location

The meeting will occur at Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City, MO.

Interested in Meeting

Please contact Jason Newland at jnewland1@cmh.edu or Christy Phillips at cphillips@idsociety.org if you are interested in attending the meeting

BODYNETS 2012, 7th International Conference on Body Area Networks

Oslo, Norway, September 24–26, 2012

The advancement in sensing, embedded computing, and wireless communication has accelerated the progress of adopting sensor networks to form Body Area Networks (BodyNets). BodyNets integrate and deploy wireless sensors, RFID tags, and other pervasive devices within and around human bodies for constructing diverse and practical systems for physiological monitoring, human computer interaction, and provision of entertainment. This conference will explore and explain the scope and challenges of designing, building, and deploying BodyNets. In this regard, the conference aims to establish a forum to exchange ideas, discuss practices, raise awareness, and share experiences among researchers and practitioners in the field of computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, medicine, and other disciplines in both academia and industry. This conference also allows authors to present new and emerging trends to address the technical, social, system and application issues related to BodyNets.

While the mission of the conference is to share novel basic research ideas as well as experimental applications in the BodyNets area in addition to identifying new directions for future research and development the new scientific topics such as nano communication networks, bio-inspired networks, molecular networks, etc. will be considered. BodyNets 2012 will give researchers a unique opportunity to share their perspectives with others interested in the various aspects from molecular to micro level communication to novel applications from medicine to automobile industry. The conference consists of four symposia that cover a broad range of research aspects. In addition, the program will include three outstanding keynote speakers from academia and industry. A panel session on “Nano communications networks: from theory to practical applications” and an industrial track will surely provoke thoughtful discussions. There will also be two tutorials given free of charge to all BodyNets 2012 attendees. We hope that the conference proceedings will serve as a valuable reference to researchers and developers in the area.

Request more information about the conference: conferences@icst.org