Calendar of events, awards and opportunities

Every week, we update this list with new meetings, awards, scholarships and events to help you advance your career. If you’d like us to feature something that you’re offering to the bioscience community, email us with the subject line “For calendar.” ASBMB members’ offerings take priority, and we do not promote products/services. Learn how to advertise in ASBMB Today.

Oct. 25: Too creative for science?

The American Society for Cell Biology is hosting a webinar featuring Ahna Skop, a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an artist. (We've written about Skop before, if you want to learn about her in advance.) ASCB says "Too creative for science?" will cover "the benefit of the arts in science, particularly in the science classroom and its advantages with increasing public engagement." Join in at 4 p.m. Monday. Register.

Oct. 27: Developing a teaching philosophy and statement

Another offering from ASCB this week is for those of you preparing your teaching philosophy statements and teaching statements. The webinar will host two early-career faculty members as speakers — Minal Mulye of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and Victoria Jeffers of the University of New Hampshire — who've recently gone through the job-application process and secured positions. Register.

Oct. 27: Immigration for scientific researchers

The final ASCB event that we'll feature this week is a webinar featuring an immigration lawyer, brian Getson, about obtaining an EB-1/NIW green card. Here's what the society says about the purpose of the event: "News headlines have created misplaced panic in the scientific community and a clear understanding of the new rules will restore your confidence. Please join us as we explain the qualifications and how this can impact you and other scientific researchers." Register.

Oct. 27: "Scientific knowledge for everyone" webinar

In observance of Open Access Week, Annual Reviews will convene a panel of researchers and a science journalist to discuss the value of communicating science within and beyond the academy. Here's an excerpt from an email we received about the event: "The conversation will explore issues ranging from the societal — such as the need for scientific findings to inform sound policy responses to the pandemic and climate change — to the personal, through stories from the speakers’ working lives where unlocking knowledge helped guide individual decisions or spark an appreciation of the natural world." See the speakers and register.

Oct. 30: Apply for PALM fellowship

The Promoting Active Learning and Mentoring (PALM) Network is accepting applications from postdocs and faculty members who wish to learn about and get better at implementing evidence-based active learning. This program is supported by the National Science Foundation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, fellows and mentors will participate virtually. Learn more.

ASBMB Lipid Research Division Seminar Series

The ASBMB Lipid Research Division features the work of young investigators at noon Eastern on a Wednesday of each month. If you are interested in presenting, please contact John Burke. Register once to access the whole series.

Here are the speakers for the Nov. 3 event:

Holly Merta of Yale University: Cell cycle regulation of ER membrane biogenesis through CTDNEP1 control of lipin 1 is required for mitotic fidelity

Huan Wang of University of California, Los Angeles: Lipin 1 modulates mRNA splicing during fasting adaptation in liver

Important 2022 ASBMB Annual Meeting deadlines

The ASBMB annual meeting will be held in person in Philadelphia in April. Here are the deadlines you need to know.

Registration

• Feb. 7: Early registration (largest discount) ends
• Feb. 8: Advance registration (smaller but still significant discount) begins
• March 18: Advance registration ends
• March 19: Regular registration begins

Abstracts

• Nov. 30: Regular submissions end
• Dec. 15: Last-chance submissions begin
• Jan. 27: Last-chance submissions end

Travel awards

• Dec. 7: Deadline for applications

Dec. 1: Deadline for ACS Merck award nominations

The American Chemical Society Women Chemists Committee's Merck Research Award is given to eight people, all of whom give lectures at a special symposium at the society's fall national meeting. Nominees must be in their third or fourth year of grad school. Importantly, this is an award for, as the website states, "female-identified individuals and persons assigned female at birth." Learn more.

Dec. 1: Deadline for HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is accepting applications from underrepresented scientists for its Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program. Up to 25 fellows will win grants for postdoctoral training and will be eligible for continued funding as they begin their independent careers. Learn about eligibility and application materials.

Dec. 11: Making inclusive and interprofessional strides

The American Association of Anatomists has a virtual meeting coming up on Dec. 11 that might be of interest to people in the BMB world. Former ASBMB staffer Joanna Kotloski, who now works at AAA, pointed out to us that some of the abstract categories (neurobiology, histology, cellular and molecular biology, and developmental biology) are in the ASBMB lane. The event, hosted by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, is on Dec. 11, but you have to register by Dec. 10. We usually prefer to list only free events on this calendar, and this one is free for AAA members, but the fees for nonmembers are decidedly reasonable, so we're making an exception. Learn more.

Jan. 2: AAAS mass media fellowship application due

The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship has earned much praise over the years for training scientists to become professional science writers and communicators. The application period for the next 10-week summer program is Jan. 2. We strongly encourage emerging scicommers, in particular those who wish to work in newsrooms, to consider applying. Learn more about the program.

Jan. 10: Submit an abstract for the ASBMB Deuel Conference on Lipids

The ASBMB Deuel conference is a must-attend event for leading lipids investigators — and for scientists who’ve just begun to explore the role of lipids in their research programs. This event will bring together a diverse array of people — including those who have not attended Deuel or perhaps any lipid meeting before.

The meeting will be held March 1–4 in Monterey, Calif.

“We'd love to bring in people who might not have cut their teeth in the lipid metabolism field but have found their way to studying lipids. In many cases, that's where you get the most exciting, unusual and off-the-wall presentations, and that can spark collaborations that may have otherwise not have happened,” explains co-organizer Russell DeBose-Boyd.

This year's theme is "Location, location, location: How lipid trafficking impacts cell signaling and metabolism."

Co-organizer Arun Radhakrishnan explains it this way: “In recent years, we have begun to gain deep insights into the mechanisms of lipid trafficking. We thought it would be great to have a meeting focusing on that aspect and what those what these new insights are telling us about cell signaling and metabolism.”

The early registration deadline is Dec. 6. Abstracts are being accepted through Jan. 10. Regular registration ends Feb. 1. See the program.

Jan. 23: Papers about STEM education and workforce due

The Journal of Science Policy & Governance and Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, have launched a call for papers on "Re-envisioning STEM Education and Workforce Development for the 21st Century." The journal will produce a special issue with the winning submissions. The deadline is Jan. 23. ASBMB Today contributor Adriana Bankston is the journal's CEO and managing publiusher. She told us in an email: "For the issue, we are seeking op-eds and policy position papers for re-envisioning the landscape in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and building forward a future that is focused on equity and inclusion, access to technology, and aligning training opportunities with workforce demands. First, second and third place competition winners will be awarded cash prizes." Here's the call for submissions.

Call for virtual scientific event proposals

The ASBMB provides members with a virtual platform to share scientific research and accomplishments and to discuss emerging topics and technologies with the BMB community.

The ASBMB will manage the technical aspects, market the event to tens of thousands of contacts and present the digital event live to a remote audience. Additional tools such as polling, Q&A, breakout rooms and post event Twitter chats may be used to facilitate maximum engagement.

Seminars are typically one to two hours long. A workshop or conference might be longer and even span several days.

Prospective organizers may submit proposals at any time. Decisions are usually made within four to six weeks. 

Propose an event.

Evolution and core processes in gene expression

Coming to an in-person venue in the summer of 2022: The focus of this meeting is to discuss the most recent insights into the cis-regulatory code, how cis-regulatory information is read out by transcription factors, signaling pathways and other proteins, how cellular diversity is created during development and how we can study this problem using cutting-edge genomics technology and computational methods.

The meeting will simultaneously examine the problem from an evolutionary perspective: how cis-regulatory elements evolve, how regulatory variation affects gene expression and phenotypes, how these changes have shaped development and parallel evolution, and how noise affects regulatory circuits and their evolution.

Stay tuned for abstract and registration deadlines.