NSF Award
1133162
1133162, Pikov<br/><br/>The ICNPD-2011 conference will bring together international investigators of all levels to Sidney, Australia in order to discuss recent research findings and to establish new collaborations in the new and exciting field of neural prosthetic devices. The conference will take place on November 26-27, 2011. It will be preceded by a series of online discussions by the organizing committee, resulting in the selection of several key innovation challenges in the field that will be addressed at the conference. This proposal aims to expand the participation of junior US researchers at the conference by subsidizing their travel costs. <br/><br/>Intellectual Merit<br/>The overall conference theme will be the technological and biological challenges in translating the neural prosthetics into clinic. There are multiple research groups worldwide involved in development and testing of neuroprosthetic implants for a variety of neurological disorders and similar difficulties often arise in selecting biocompatible encapsulation materials, in applying modern wireless communication technology, in better understanding of clinical and user needs, etc. Several discussion panels will be held at the conference to stimulate the interaction of participants in seeking the solutions for these prevailing challenges, rather than simply reporting on the progress from the laboratories. An additional emphasis of the conference will be upon identifying the areas of possible collaborations between the US and Australian scientists and finding the mechanisms for jump-starting these collaborations. There are multiple opportunities for the researchers to initiate productive collaborative projects in the development and testing of devices for the hearing and vision loss, muscle paralysis, Parkinson?s disease, epilepsy, and other neurological disorders. The conference described in this proposal is one that will bring together established investigators and early-career researchers just entering this field. To enable a focused exchange at the discussion panels during the two-day meeting, there will be a series of brainstorming online discussions preceding the conference.<br/><br/>Broader Impact<br/>The conference can inform the NSF about new developments in the rapidly growing neural prosthetics field. A specific goal of the NSF that will be aided by the conference is the establishment of new programs which emphasize integration of neural technology research and medical device industry. The conference will provide a good opportunity to highlight best practices in this area and to bring lessons from this experience to the NSF initiatives. <br/><br/>The conference participants will be selected to represent a broad spectrum of interested participants from academia, national laboratories, government, and industry. Recruitment of participants representing researchers at all stages in their careers from well established to new researchers just starting their career will be actively pursued. A special effort will be made to increase the representation of women and underrepresented minorities at the conference. The conference program, poster and talk abstracts will be posted on the conference website as well as on Frontiers Conferences, a premier online depository for the conference proceedings in the<br/>neuroscience-related fields (www.frontiersin.org/conferences), to serve as a practical educational tool. In addition, the selected short papers, submitted to the conference, will be peer-reviewed and published as a special issue of the open-access journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
