International Society for Regenerative Biology Biennial Conference - PROJECT SUMMARY This proposal requests partial funding for the second, third and fourth biennial conference of the International Society for Regenerative Biology (ISRB) to occur over a five-year period, beginning with ISRB’s second meeting scheduled for August 12-15, 2025 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The inaugural meeting took place in Vienna September 2-6, 2023. More than 270 investigators, including principal investigators, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate researchers attended the inaugural meeting. The ISRB was established in 2021 with an overarching goal to formalize an inclusive and integrated community of scientists that study all aspects of tissue regeneration in invertebrate and vertebrate model organisms. These include a dominant theme of basic discovery research, while also welcoming engineering and regenerative medicine applications. ISRB membership has reached >300 individuals, with >150 faculty, >60 postdoctoral fellows, and >75 graduate students with more than half of the current ISRB membership located in the United States. With continued meetings and activities, we anticipate growing our membership. The society intends to provide highly international science experiences for US (and all) trainees. In addition to organizing its own main conference, the ISRB also hosts virtual events such as webinars, while supporting and enhancing other workshops and small meetings. ISRB will convey the importance and impact of regeneration research to the greater scientific and lay communities, highlight regenerative biologists and their discoveries, and promote regenerative biology by giving awards for achievements and service, and by advocating for research and community funding. The ISRB biennial conference is the premier opportunity for researchers in the broad field of tissue regeneration across diverse species, tissues, contexts of injury, developmental stages and disease, to meet and share data and ideas. A main goal of this meeting is to encourage interdisciplinary, cross-species and cross-tissue comparisons as a key to enhancing understanding of the commonalities and divergences in regenerative capacity and of the mechanisms regulating regeneration across paradigms – toward the creation of an integrative framework. ISRB provides an interactive forum for students, postdoctoral fellows and investigators at all stages to present their work and interact with other investigators, and the society actively supports diversity and inclusion in science. In this proposal, financial support is requested to help defray conference fees for attendees, with a goal of ensuring diversity among attendees and to enable attendance of those at early career stages.
