Join us for the 1st Carolina Neurostimulation Conference May 21-23 at UNC - Chapel Hill. We will launch an official website soon such that you can register. For now, I suggest you reserve those dates on your calendar (registration will be cheap in comparison to other meeting!). We have a truly amazing speaker line up (plus great representation of outstanding women scientists!) and I am delighted to give you as the reader of my blog an unofficial peak into our list (more to come...)

• Holly Lisanby
• Kaspar Schindler
• Angel Peterchev
• Bernadette Gillick
• Colleen Hanlon
• Emiliano Santarnecchi
• Christoph Herrmann
• Charlotte Stagg
• Sven Bestmann
• Andrew Leuchter
• Hartwig Siebner
• Hanli Liu
• Marom Bikson
• Noah Philip
• Bernadette Fitzgibbon
• Lindsay Obermann
• Many more...

Join us - this will be fun!

I am on my way back from the epic ACNP 2017 meeting and I have spent some time thinking about the meta-aspects of going to scientific conferences, from practical to philosophical. Hopefully you will find my musings helpful!​

Travel Logistics

• Sign up for the reward programs of all major hotel chains. I am finding that there are plenty of advantages beyond collecting points (which never quite seem to add up to anything). However, there are small things that add up in terms of how smooth the trip goes, which makes the extra hassle of signing up worth it (free internet, late checkout etc).
• Collect all your receipts for reimbursement in one place. I use Expensify (I am have no relationship with them except being a customer) to assemble all my receipts and submit an expense report directly from their site. Saves a lot of time.

Conference Logistics

• Make sure you have a plan what you want to do in terms of talks and posters. Going to a meeting without a specific plan will be a great waste of energy and time. No matter how many meetings I have been to, I find that this remains crucial to get the most out of it.
• If you are junior and you do not know people, be bold and introduce yourself. If you are shy, remember that most scientists are introverts. In all my career as scientist, I have been only once rebuffed in an uncomfortable way, so the chance of this happening is really small and even if it happens, it is so worth it in terms of what you gain from all the other successful interactions.
• If you are senior, please do not only spend time with you good old friends but deliberately seek our trainees. Ask them about their science, offer unsolicited career advice, and be encouraging!
• Also prepare a list of people you would like to meet and use it as a guide for how you spend you time at the meeting.
• Get nice business cards and hand them out liberally, does not matter if you are a first time junior conference attendee or the big shark. There is something friendly and exciting about exchanging business cards, I find. Just make sure you do not carry them in your wallet to make sure they do not look like your dog has chewed on them liberally.
• Take detailed notes!
• Organize a lab meeting when you are back to give an update on what you have learned and thought at the conference. This will force you to truly and deeply engage with the material at the meeting and will also greatly leverage the investment of you going to the meeting since the knowledge is further disseminated.
• If you use Twitter, try to provide meaningful content instead of just bragging! If the conference rules allow it, providing info about the discussions, questions asked etc can be really helpful to others who have not had the chance to go to the meeting. Maybe I am just getting old but I am getting tired of all the tweets that pretty much say "look how awesome I am", including the variant "I skipped a day at the meeting and look what amazing trip I undertook."

Personal Advice

• Going to meetings is great fun but it can also be a quite a disruption with negative consequences for your health. Maintain and build your daily routine of taking care of yourself. Take the time to call to say good night to your kids, and do not forget to go to the gym.

Take care,

Flavio

Today, I have big news for you. Our Carolina Center for Neurostimulation at UNC - Chapel Hill is organizing a brain stimulation conference (May 21-23 2018)! We are in the process of inviting and confirming speakers, so you will have to be patient for bit longer, I will make sure to post updates here. For now, I ask you to save the date for the Carolina Neurostimulation Conference 2018.

The goal of the meeting is to create foster and celebrate a diverse community of brain stimulation researchers. We made it our priority to make the meeting accessible and affordable. The trainees (from undergrad to senior postdoc) in our Center are organizing the conference, from inviting the speakers all the way to the conference logistics. We are looking forward to having you! 

One fact I am particular proud of is that we are trying hard to address one of the problems our community has, which is that women scientist have been (massively) underrepresented at previous meetings. More on this later.

I spent some time thinking about the field of non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) and came up with the following four challenges we need to urgently and thoroughly discuss and address as a community:

• Lack of Neuroscience: Still most of the studies in the field are quite remote from any neuroscience (measuring target engagement, anyone?!). Without neuroscience, my prediction is that the field will be soon in very serious trouble. Most studies (including some of ours, I am responsible for this too) are based on very simplistic notions that barely make the cut as neuroscience-based. How about we stimulate left dl-PFC for anything under the sun? Let's work hard to move to more specific, neuroscience-based targets and make sure to measure a ton of (neuro-)physiology before and after, and ideally during stimulation.
• Gender: As discussed elsewhere, the last few conferences in the field featured a line-up in which women were clearly underrepresented relative to the gender distribution in the field. This is not good. Let's make sure when we design conferences, plan meetings, and choose collaborators, we pick from the pool of outstanding people, both men and women. Here is a great starting point, a database of women in the field.
• Study design: I still see many, many studies which are not double-blind in design. Please stop doing that since we know for a fact that we cannot trust such results.
• Conflicts of interest (COI). Western medicine is full of unacceptable situations where financial and other types of conflict of interests have harmed research participants and patients. Industry has an important role (my regular readers will know about my COIs, in particular my ownership of Pulvinar Neuro LLC), but we need to be clear and obvious about this. No need for any kind of COI histeria, but let's make sure we mention our COIs not only when we are forced to do so, but also in other situations. Let's be a model for how we can ethically and effectively collaborate with industry.

That's it! Are you ready to collaborate to address these challenges? We have something special in the planning, more details later, but for now please hold May 21-23 2018 in your calendar, I promise it will be worth it!

Take care,

Flavio