Planned Meetings

Dr. Da-Yu Wu has organized and will chair the first NIDA symposium at the 2009 World Molecular Imaging Congress to be held on September 23 to 26, 2009 in Montreal Canada, titled "NIDA/NIH Mini-Symposium: MI in Drug Addiction". Speakers and titles are: 1) Joanna S. Fowler, Brookhaven National Laboratory, "Imaging Brain Chemistry in Diseases of Addiction"; 2) Christina Liu, Mass General Hospital/Harvard University, "Live Brain Gene Imaging of Drug Addiction"; 3) Brian D. Ross, Huntington Medical Research Institutes, "Glutamate Neurotransmitter Function in the Human Brain: A Multinuclear MRS Approach to Drug Addiction, Recovery and Relapse"; 4) Dean F. Wong, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, "SPECT Imaging in Living Brains of Smokers."

The next National CTN Steering Committee Meetings are planned for October 20-22, 2009 in Bethesda, MD. In the spring, the Steering Committee Meetings will be held April 19-21, 2010 in conjunction with the NIDA Blending Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The CTN Regional Dissemination Workshops are scheduled for October 28-29, 2009 in Pittsburgh, PA and November 2, 2009 in Charleston, SC.

NIDA will host a T32 Training Directors' Meeting on November 2, 2009 at the Pooks Hill Bethesda Marriott Hotel in Maryland. This meeting will offer a forum for training directors to discuss any challenges they are facing as well as ways to enhance their research training programs. The central theme of this meeting will be on sustaining training programs for the 21st century, and topics will include recent peer review changes, recruitment and retention, mentorship, evaluation and tracking, and other best practices.

A NIDA-OSPC meeting entitled, Exploring Interconnections: A Network Dynamics Workshop for Understanding and Preventing Adolescent and Young Adult Substance Abuse, will be held at NIH's main campus on January 13-14, 2010. Drs. Bethany Griffin Deeds, Elizabeth Ginexi, and Thomas Brady of DESPR are co-chairs of the event. This workshop focuses on bringing researchers utilizing network dynamics together with a select group of drug abuse epidemiologists, prevention, and services researchers to: share findings from social network research and to discuss obstacles and opportunities for stimulating scientific advancements and translating these findings to understand, prevent, and deliver treatment services/ recovery support for adolescent and young adult substance abuse.

NIDA's eighth Blending Conference will be convened at the Albuquerque Convention Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 22-23, 2010. This 2-day conference is designed to bring clinicians and researchers together to jointly present the most recent scientific drug abuse and addiction findings and their application to clinical practice. NIDA's Deputy Director, Dr. Timothy Condon, is overseeing all conference planning activities and Drs. Cindy Miner (OSPC) and Denise Pintello (OD) are working closely with the two CTN Node PIs co-hosting the Blending Conference: Drs. James Sorenson (California-Arizona Node) and Michael Bogenschutz (Southwest Node).