11th Latin American Society for Developmental Biology (LASDB) Conference - SUMMARY The Congress of the Latin American Society for Developmental Biology (LASDB) is the major event in this discipline in Latin America and has successfully been organized in different countries every two years since 2003. For pandemic reasons, LASDB meetings have not occurred since the one in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2019. Hence, the 11th LASDB meeting, to be organized in Chile in 2024, is a very special and long-awaited opportunity to re-connect the Latin American community by bringing together approximately 300 highly motivated graduate students, postdocs and junior scientists from the region, as well top-notch researchers working in different countries around the world for discussions of the recent advances in the field. This meeting will also coincide with the inaugural meeting of the recently created Chilean Society for Developmental Biology (SBDCh) and with the first meeting in Latin America of the Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology (PASEDB) whose purpose is to integrate and help develop Evo-Devo in Latin America, a continent rich in amazing, yet, understudied, biological diversity. The main goal of the LASDB is to promote active discussions of the latest advances in Developmental Biology in a highly dynamic and interactive environment, favoring synergies of ideas and networking opportunities. For preparing the list of 22 outstanding invited speakers, the organizers of the meeting were advised by an international Scientific Committee formed by leading scientists with previous close ties to the Latin American community, including Marianne Bronner (Caltech, USA), Roberto Mayor UCL, London), Alfonso Martinez-Arias (UPF, Spain) and Karen Crow (UC Santa Cruz, USA). This committee was concerned with ensuring that the list of speakers was of excellent scientific quality and had a virtuous balance of gender, career stage, ethnicity/country of origin, topic, and model organism. Most speakers (80%) have already confirmed their participation, 50% are women, 23% are young PIs, 27% are based in Latin America, 32% are from the USA and 41% are from the EU/UK, and among the USA and EU/UK 25% are of Latin American origin. A total of six scientific sessions or symposia will cover classic topics and emerging areas in the field. Each session will have time allocated for three talks by invited speakers (30 mins each), three short talks (15 mins each) and five flash-talks from posters (2.5 mins each) selected from submitted abstracts.
