ARO Member News

October 2014 

In This Issue
Registration
Hotel Reservations
Onsite Childcare Services
spARO Update
Letter from the President
Letter from the Program Chair

 Registration is Open for the MWM

Registration is now open for the 38th MidWinter Meeting. To register online, log onto ARO's website. Make sure to renew your membership first, so you receive the discounted rate.

 

Make Your Hotel Reservations for the 2015 MWM 

 

The 2015 MidWinter Meeting will take place at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel located at 700 Aliceanna street, Baltimore, MD 21202, USA.

 

The group rate for the ARO MidWinter Meeting is $204.

 

For reservations call 1-800-228-9290, and mention ARO to receive the group's rate, or reserve your stay online through the reservation portal. 

 

The deadline for reservations is Thursday, January 29, 2015. 

 

2015 MWM Onsite Childcare Services 

 

ARO would like to encourage parents' attendance to the Midwinter Meeting by partially supplementing onsite child care. ARO has selected KiddieCorp as the onsite child care provide, for more information about the program CLICK HERE or download the registration form.

 

Please contact KiddieCorp directly with any questions pertaining to the program,  

(858) 455-1718 or by e-mail at [email protected].  

 

spARO Update 

spARO logo  

 

Each year the student and postdoc chapter of ARO (spARO, pronounced 'sparrow') hosts a number of events meant to improve the experience of burgeoning young students and trainees at the Midwinter Meetings for ARO. Through our mentoring sessions, young investigators lunch, and social, we want to invite all new and current associate ARO (spARO) members into the ARO community and build a sense ofcomraderyamongst the new generation of ARO-affiliated professionals.

 

The mentoring sessions are quite helpful for young investigators and cover a wide range of topics. Last year, for example, there were 8 mentoring sessions, including "The pros and cons of being a clinical scientist", "Transitioning from scientist to administrator", and "How to look for a job and start a lab". This year there will be another 8 sessions, covering a different set of topics and issues young professionals face.

 

Each year, spARO hosts a lunch-time talk with a past Burt Evans award winner. This event will continue to be an interactive way for spARO members to be introduced to and advised by successful members of the ARO community. We encourage all spARO members to attend the spARO town hall, the mentoring sessions, and the young investigators lunch. Most importantly, our social event, which is held at a pub within walking distance from the hotel, is an excellent way to grab a few free beers and mingle with your colleagues.

 

spARO's aims are to improve the relationships between trainees and successful members of the scientific and medical fields and to build relationships within our own generation. This will ultimately help us to build a network of friends and colleagues that will guide us along our paths as scientists. We strongly urge any interested member to come by and attend any of our events at the 2015 Midwinter Meeting.

 

Hope to see you there.

 

Will Hamlet

President, spARO


 



Greetings!

 

With abstracts now submitted and registration open, excitement is building for the 2015 Midwinter Meeting of the ARO!  See important information below from Program Chair Ruth Litovsky and spARO President Will Hamlet, along with information related to child care at the meeting.  In addition to the meeting activities, your ARO Council has been busy working on a new website under the leadership of ARO President Ruth Anne Eatock.  Dr. Eatock shares information in her President's Letter about that effort and new aspects of the website.  Check out the website and we will see you in February!

 

Best regards,

Linda J. Hood, Ph.D.
ARO Editor

Letter from the President

 

New ARO website launched in early September www.aro.org 

 

ARO Council, working together with Talley Management, elected to shift to a browser-based website that will be more responsive and easier to update than previous versions. Following significant advance work by a Talley team led by Haley Brust and Danielle Barsuglia, "Your Membership" software was chosen by an ad hoc ARO Website Committee: Barbara Canlon, Ruth Anne Eatock, Linda Hood, Ruth Litovsky, Dan Polley, and, representing spARO, Nate Zuk. This software provides, at a modest cost, member-only and public areas, a customizable directory, a home for special-interest groups, and the opportunity to expand offerings as needed with additional investment.

 

Soliciting new content

 

We look forward to working with you to build a vibrant website with ever-evolving content useful to researchers in fields related to otolaryngology. What you see now on the website is bare-bones, much it transferred from the previous website in order to launch in time to be useful for the 2015 meeting. Planned future content includes contributions from each ARO committee to inform members of ongoing initiatives, solicit feedback, and stimulate progress on each committee's missions; enhanced publicity for Midwinter Meeting events; and a more useful and searchable archive of ARO Meeting Abstracts.

 

We also welcome your ideas and contributions, such as:

  • Announcements for related meetings, job opportunities, new academic programs, special courses, public lectures
  • Links to relevant databases
  • Summaries of meetings, new research and technical developments
  • Interest groups
  • Graphics and photographs of data or ARO-related science/scientists in action
  • Educational content for public consumption

 

How to set up sustainable and reliable oversight of website content is under discussion at Council. This task will probably come under the supervision of the Publications Committee reporting to the Editor.

 

Members Only offerings

 

After you log in as a member (upper right corner of the webpage), you should have access to:

  • An expanded Member Directory with customizable profiles
  • The ability to form working groups, from large groups such as spARO to small groups such as ARO committees. You initiate and manage your participation under "Groups" in the "Member Profile"
  • Full access to the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (JARO)

Send contributions, suggestions, or inquiries by email to [email protected] or via the inquiry form reached at the "Contact Us" button at the top of each page on the ARO website.

 

Ruth Anne Eatock, Ph.D.

President, ARO

 

Letter from the Program Chair

 

ARO's upcoming annual meeting in Baltimore is only four months away and we are busily preparing what promises to be an outstanding program. I would like to extend my deep gratitude to the program committee and to our partners at Talley for their hard work. I would also like to thank the organizers of excellent symposia, workshops and young-investigator symposia. This year we received an unprecedented number of strong proposals, 19 of which will be included in the 2015 meeting. In addition, we are delighted that we have received the highest number of abstract submissions to date. The program committee is currently hard at work, putting together what is promising to be an outstanding meeting. Please note that, as was the case last year, all symposia and podium sessions at the 2015 meeting will be set to 2-hour slots. In addition, we instituted a change in the timing, such that all talks will be allocated 15- or 30-minute intervals. We hope that this will provide everyone with ample opportunity to organize their schedules more easily across parallel sessions, and to enjoy the many talks and posters while also having plenty of opportunity to roam the posters and meet with the exhibitors (or grab a drink and bite with friends and colleagues). Our young investigators will once again have opportunities to partake in mentoring sessions throughout the conference. Last year's successful highlights of our junior faculty and postdoctoral fellows resulted in two opportunities that are being repeated in 2015. First, we will have 'Young Investigator Symposia' on the following topics: (1) Mechanisms in binaural hearing: from synapses to psychophysics, (2) Quantifying the influences of internal noise on auditory processing - from neural coding to behavior, and (3) Computational modeling of auditory perception. Second, the 'Poster Blitz' will highlight junior investigators' posters through a brief oral presentation on Saturday afternoon. We encourage you to attend these exciting sessions, and hope that we can see more proposals for the following year. Please note that we will be accepting proposals for symposia for the 2016 meeting by April 1st 2015. The ARO meeting provides an excellent opportunity to meet with colleagues in Baltimore and begin planning. As always, if you have any ideas to change or improve upon the meeting, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. 

 

We very much look forward to welcoming you to the upcoming annual meeting of the ARO in Baltimore in February 2015. 

 

Ruth Litovsky, PhD

Program Chair


Registration Now Open

 

38th ARO MidWinter Meeting 
February 21-25, 2015 
Baltimore Marriott Waterfront 
Baltimore, Maryland, USA

 

 Save the Date  

 

Invited Speaker Programming
 
  
Presidential Symposium:
  • Diverse Ears serving Diverse Tasks: Communicating, Moving, Learning, Deciding
Invited Sessions Symposia:
  
  • Age-Related Vestibular Loss: Research Update and Setting the 5-Year Research Agenda
  • Binaural Processing and Spatial Unmasking for Bilateral, Bimodal and Single-Sided Deafness Cochlear-Implant Users
  • Cellular Calcium Signaling in the Auditory System
  • Chromatin and Transcriptional Regulation of Neurosensory Development
  • Cortical Dynamics of Human Auditory Perception: Insights from Electrocorticography (Ecog) Studies
  • Epidemiological Perspectives on Age-Related Hearing Loss: Risk Factors and Prevention
  • The Functional Organization of Human Auditory Cortex
  • The Hearing Restoration Project
  • Mechanisms of Social Hearing
  • Neural Substrates of Music Processing: From Perception to Cognition
  • New Perspectives on Sound Exposure and Subcortical Processing: from Environmental Effects to Damaging Sounds
  • Non-Coding RNAs in the Auditory System
  • Planar Polarity and Neurosensory Development
  • The Transmembrane Channel-Like Family: Molecules, Mechanisms and Models of Mechanotransduction
 
Workshops:
  • Junior Scientist Poster Pitch Blitz Session
  • Mobile and Web Auditory Training Apps for Hearing Impaired Adults - Translational and Scientific Challenges
  • Tool Shop: Workshop for Auditory Research Software
Young Investigator Symposia:
  • Computational Modeling of Auditory Perception
  • Mechanisms in Binaural Hearing: from Synapses to Psychophysics
  • Quantifying the Influences of Internal Noise on Auditory Processing - from Neural Coding to Behavior 
ARO Public Lecture at the National Aquarium (open to the public):
 
  • Navigating the World through Sound: Echolocation by the Blind
 
Baltimore Scape