In April, the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center (VKC) concluded its 5-year commitment as host of the annual Gatlinburg Conference on Research and Theory in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, the premier national gathering of researchers and future researchers in the field.
“It’s serendipitous that our cycle of hosting ends in 2015, when our Center is celebrating its 50th anniversary,” said Elisabeth Dykens, Ph.D., VKC director and Gatlinburg Conference Chair. “This extraordinary national meeting is a part of our own Center’s history as well as the field’s history.”
The Gatlinburg Conference was started by Dr. Norm Ellis, a faculty member in Psychology at Peabody College who was a researcher in the early years of the VKC, and colleagues in the field. The Conference began as a small gathering of faculty and trainees who met in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in the Smoky Mountains. Today, it is a national and international conference held in major U.S. cities.
“As always, this Conference is a forum to share scientific findings and to promote networking, above all for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, the future of the field,” Dykens said.
The 48th Annual Gatlinburg Conference, held in New Orleans, April 1-3, had as its theme “Bringing Big Data to I/DD.” More than 200 attendees, 40 percent of whom were students, postdoctoral fellows, and trainees, flew into the Crescent City from around the globe. There were 102 posters and 17 symposia accepted for presentation.
The three plenary sessions featured Scott Zeger, Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins U), Matthew Goodwin, Ph.D. (Northeastern U), and D. Kimbrough Oller, Ph.D. (U Memphis). Representatives from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (EKS NICHD) participated in a panel discussion on trends in research and grant proposals. The Gatlinburg Conference Executive Committee members offered advice to junior researchers in a joint informal mentor meeting and career/family life balance discussion.
After 5 years as institutional host, the VKC is passing on Conference coordinating duties to the University of California Davis MIND Institute. The Conference co-chairs will be Leonard Abbeduto, Ph.D., Tsakopoulos-Vismara Endowed Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and director of the MIND Institute at UC Davis; and Connie Kasari, Ph.D., professor of Psychological Studies in Education and Psychiatry at UCLA and founding member of the Center for Autism Research and Treatment.
With support of a 5-year grant from the EKS NICHD, each institutional host is responsible for working with the conference’s Executive Committee members to secure a conference location each year, to invite and to accommodate esteemed IDD researchers who serve as plenary speakers, to collect abstracts and to select presenters, to create a schedule, and to produce print and web materials for the conference, among other responsibilities.
The VKC Gatlinburg Conference coordination team consisted of VKC Director Elisabeth Dykens, Ph.D., who served as director of the Executive Committee; conference manager Laura McLeod; and conference co-manager Elizabeth Turner.
“What an honor it has been for the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center to host the Gatlinburg Conference, and to work alongside our Executive Committee members in promoting collaboration and new discoveries in the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities,” said Dykens. “The conference has seen such tremendous growth these past 5 years, including an increasing number of student and trainee attendees and diverse international representation among our presenters, some of whom come halfway around the globe to participate. There is no doubt in my mind that Len, Connie, and the UC Davis team will keep this forward momentum going with the next five conferences.”
The overall aims of the conference are to promote exchange of information regarding the latest findings in behavioral and biobehavioral research on the causes, prevention, and interventions for intellectual disability and related developmental disabilities; to further researchers’ understanding of the manifestations of those disabilities; to better characterize the contexts in which people with disabilities and their families live; to promote collaboration among behavioral scientists; and to provide a major training resource for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and other junior scientists entering the field of intellectual disabilities research.
The 49th Gatlinburg Conference will be held March 9-11, 2016, in San Diego. The 2016 theme will be “Prenatal development and risk for developmental disabilities.” Click here to register to receive conference updates via e-mail.
Pictured top of page: Dr. Melissa Parisi, Chief of the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Branch at EKS NICHD, presented at the Gatlinburg Conference.
