Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting is always a great time. It's a big academic conference with stimulating talks and lots of great networking opportunities. The year the meeting was attended by over 2000 scientists at all levels, from undergraduate students to professors, in downtown Austin, Texas. Here's the view of the bars and restaurants on 6th Street from my hotel window!

The highlight of the meeting for me was a series of special sessions honouring Dr. John Wingfield's pioneering work on field endocrinology. Dr. Wingfield took endocrinology from the lab and started asking questions about circulating hormones in wild birds from the arctic to the tropics, exploring the patterns of circulating hormones change during reproduction and other challenges. His research changed the way that we think about stress in wild animals, and developed the foundation for conservation physiology.

At the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, the talks in the special sessions featured advances that have been made in field endocrinology, and highlighted where the field is headed. Many of the talks emphasized that we need to understand reaction norms in order to better understand how selection is operating on endocrine systems. A great talk by Dr. Britt Heidinger highlighted that telomere shortening might explain the long-term effects of developmental stress, while Dr. Micheal Romero presented a model showing that populations under stress disproportionately reply on the oldest and highest quality individuals for persistence. Check out the abstract book for full details of all of the talks!