Proposals for plenary sessions must be submitted no later than September 30, 2010.

The most successful sessions in the past have been those that concentrated on teaching an area of neuroscience to an audience having little knowledge of the area's details. SBC is not a specialty meeting in which the audience is composed of experts in the speaker's specific area. The amount of detail presented should be roughly similar to the News and Views section in Nature. The organizer needs to [1] provide a clear background and overview of the topic at the beginning of the session. Speakers should then [2] indicate the most important areas of research and findings in the field and [3] possibly include some "cutting edge" data, presented in ways that are comprehensible to a diverse audience.  (Speakers should plan to speak for 20 minutes or less to allow time for introduction by the organizer and for discussion.) The organizer will then need to [4] summarize the most important information presented during the session. This format has generated wide-ranging and interesting discussions on the topics and their implications.

Proposals should be sent via email to (proposals@springbrain.org) by September 30, 2010 with the following information:

• Title of the proposed plenary session
• Name, affiliation, and email address for the organizer of the session
• 200 word-abstract summarizing the session's goal and issues each speaker will address
• Name, affiliation, and email address for each of the speakers
• Titles for each talk of less than 20 minutes

Each session will be limited to 2-3 speakers only. In order to get a broad cross-section of views on a field, sessions should avoid including more than two speakers from the same institution.

Organizers must get a commitment from each of the speakers to present prior to submitting the proposal.

Listed below are topics attendees of SBC have indicated they would like to see at future meetings. Perhaps one of the topics will inspire you to organize, or ask someone else to organize, a plenary session.

Suggested Topics:

• Stem cell research

• Neurotrophin actions

• Cell death mechanisms

• Pattern formation

• Epilepsy

• Hippocampal function

• Neurosurgical treatments of degenerative diseases (transplantation)

• Neurogenetics

• Learning/memory

• Neuroplasticity - recovery of function after injury/disease

• Cognition/consciousness

• Attentional and affective disorders

• Functional imaging of CNS

• Drug abuse - monoamine systems

• Transition pore in cell death

• Neurobiology of emotion

• Cutting edge technology

• Drug addiction

• Sleep disorders

• Cellular neurophysiology; synaptic function

• Cellular transduction cascades

• Developmental neurobiology

• Retinal anatomy and physiology; vision

• Neuronal excitability

• Basic and clinical models of neurodegenerative diseases

• Transgenic models in neurobiology

• Spinal cord injury/head injury/stroke

• Neurotropic factors in neurodevelopment and recovery of function

• Sensory-motor control/integration

• Neural modeling

• Brain imaging