WELCOME

The 38th Annual Meeting of the American Aging Association:
Integrative Biology: Hormones, Signaling, and Aging

 

Planning for the 38th annual American Aging Association meeting in Scottsdale, AZ from May 29 to June 1, 2009 is well underway. The theme of the meeting will be: “Integrative Biology: Hormones, Signaling, and Aging”.  The program committee is assembling an international group of experts in aging research from academia, government, and industry to share their newest findings.  More than past meetings, the 2009 meeting will include sessions whose emphasis is “translational,” oriented toward human physiology and disease, in order to strike a better balance between clinical and basic research. As usual, the meeting will consist of invited symposia, contributed oral papers, and poster presentations. The first day, coordinated by Janko Nikolich-Zugich  and Richard Faragher, will consist of a symposium of invited speakers covering a range of topics  related to the, “Integrative Biology of Aging,” and will include our annual TransAtlantic speakers from the UK. On days 2 and 3 there will be both a plenary symposium (Neurobiology of Aging and Hormones) and simultaneous symposia run concurrently. The latter will include topics ranging from basic (“Hormones, Genes, and Longevity;” “Physiology and Genomics of Caloric Restriction”) and evolutionary (“Evolution and Issues in Aging and Age-Related disease”) biology to clinical considerations (“Inflammation, age-related diseases and intervention strategies;” “Pituitary and Steroid Hormones and Aging in Humans”). When sessions are simultaneous, one will generally be more basic and the other more clinical. Following  Tom Johnson’s lead in 2008, we have also invited plenary speakers, charged with bringing the audience up to date in their particular fields of expertise. The first plenary talk by Marc R. Blackman, MD, entitled, “Hormones and Hormone Receptor Regulation During the Aging Process” will have a clinical orientation; the second by Leonard Hayflick, PhD on, “Cell senescence: Relevance to Organismal Aging,” will cover basic research issues and mechanisms. Two additional plenary talks will be given by the yet to be named winners of the Vince Cristofalo award (sponsored by AFAR) and the Denham Harman award (sponsored by AAA). The pre-meeting symposium on Friday, May 29 will be on “Proteomics of Aging: Protein Metabolism and the Aging Process,” It is being arranged by Richard Miller with the assistance of Anna Maria Cuervo. The tentative schedule is for six long "overviews," in which the speakers will give general background information to bring the audience up to date on major topics, eight short talks focused on the authors' own recent discoveries, and a final, double-length summation session that would mix questions to speakers with six very short two-slide impromptu talks.

S. Mitch Harman
2009 AGE President and Annual Meeting Chair

 

 

 

 

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