Each year the National Academies Keck FUTURES INITIATIVE hosts a conference to bring together more than 100 of the nation's best and brightest researchers from academia, industry, and government laboratories to ask questions about -- and to discover interdisciplinary connections between -- important areas of cutting-edge research. This year's conference will focus on new possibilities in the field of prosthetics.
To help overcome differences in terminology used by researchers in various fields, "tutorials" will be given by experts before the conference. Each expert will provide an overview of his or her field in language that other researchers -- scientists, engineers, or medical researchers -- not familiar with the discipline can understand. These tutorials will be webcast in September and early October.
The centerpiece of the conference will be break-out sessions in which researchers from different fields can collaborate and develop research plans to address new questions in prosthetics. Representatives from public and private funding organizations, government, industry, and the science media will also participate in the working groups. In addition, participants will have the opportunity to present their latest research at the conference. To encourage further interdisciplinary research on prosthetics, the National Academies Keck FUTURES INITIATIVE will award seed grants on a competitive basis to researchers who attend the conference.
19-Apr-2006