Scientific Program

Scientific Program Overview

The symposium will consist of five Scientific Sessions and a Poster Session. The topics to be covered in the Scientific Sessions include: Virology, Immunology, Pathogenesis, Vaccines/Prevention, and Genetics/Genomics. Each of the five scientific sessions will have an invited Chair and a Co-Chair from the host institution. The Session Chair will give a 30-minute presentation, summarizing critical developments in the particular area of research of his/her own contributions. Each session will have an additional eight oral presentations selected from submitted abstracts. The oral presentations will be 10 minutes long with 5 minutes reserved for questions from the audience.

Speakers invited to give oral presentations will be asked to contribute a manuscript for a special AIDS issue of the Journal of Medical Primatology that will be published following the meeting. We also plan to post all abstracts online on the NHP2009 website after the meeting to ensure wide accessibility.

Keynote Speakers

	Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director, NIAID will give an opening address after the Welcome Reception. In light of the recent debate on priorities in HIV research and the relevance of the non-human primate model in AIDS research, Dr. Fauci's talk will provide a timely and insightful perspective for researchers engaged in AIDS vaccine research.

	Dr. Peter Parham, professor, Stanford School of Medicine, is the keynote speaker at the start of the scientific sessions. Dr. Parham is a leader in the field of basic research on MHC class I evolution and NK receptors.

	Richard Wrangham, Harvard College Professor and Ruth Moore Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University will be the banquet speaker. His major interests are chimpanzee behavioral ecology, the evolution of violence, the influence of diet on human evolution, and the conservation of chimpanzees and other apes. He has studied chimpanzees in Uganda since 1987 as director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project (now co-Director with Martin Muller). He received his Ph.D. in Zoology from Cambridge University in 1975, and was a Research Fellow at King’s College (Cambridge) from 1977 to 1980. In 1981 he joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He has authored ~200 publications, including (with Dale Peterson) Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence and Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009). He has been Co-Chair, with Professor Toshisada Nishida, of the Great Ape World Heritage Species Project, President (2004-2008) of the International Primatological Society, and Patron of the Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP) (2005 – present).