Symposium: PharmEcology Symposium: A Pharmacological Approach to Understanding Plant-Herbivore Interactions, to be held January 2-6, 2009 in Boston, MA.

This award will fund US and international participation in The PharmEcology Symposium: A pharmacological approach to understanding plant-herbivore interactions, held at the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology Meeting from January 3-6, 2009 in Boston, MA, USA. The symposium will bring together leaders interested in multi-disciplinary research at the interface of pharmacology and the physiological ecology of plant-herbivore interactions, termed PharmEcology. Scheduled talks and breakout sessions will identify current and novel approaches for collaborative research in three general areas: 1) The biochemical mechanisms herbivores utilize to tolerate plant chemical defenses; 2) The biological activity of plant chemical defenses; and 3) The genetic diversity associated with these two components. Understanding the biochemical and genetic mechanisms by which plants defend themselves and herbivores tolerate plant chemical defenses, will provide insight into the co-evolutionary arms race between plants and herbivores, explain foraging constraints and distribution of herbivores and reveal the mechanism of action of plant compounds. Discussions will result in submission of publication(s) in the Integrative and Comparative Biology Journal and grant proposals for future collaborative research. The symposium will provide undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students opportunities to establish networks with national and international leaders in ecology and pharmacology. While students will be recruited from speaker's labs and a pre-symposium course on PharmEcology offered at Boise State University (Fall 2008), participation is open to all students and will be widely advertised. Finally, the symposium will promote diversity by including participants of equal gender (50% female speakers), from a wide range of career stages (undergraduate, graduate, post-docs, junior and established faculty) and from a variety of countries (Australia, Austria, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand, Uganda and USA) and disciplines (ecology, chemistry, physiology, evolutionary and behavioral biology and pharmacology).