Planned Meetings

NIDA is planning to hold a large conference on Drug Abuse and HIV/AIDS on September 25, 2006 in Bethesda, Maryland. This meeting will bring together leading researchers in the field with the intention of drawing attention to multiple links between drug abuse and HIV/AIDS.

Yonette Thomas, Ph.D., Chief of DESPR's Epidemiology Research Branch, and Douglas Richardson, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), are planning a symposium on Geography and Addiction, to be held March 8, 2006 in conjunction with the 2006 Annual Meeting of the AAG in Chicago, Illinois. The NIDA-AAG sponsored research symposium is an opportunity for medical researchers, epidemiologists, geographers, and others interested in geographical dimensions of drug addiction to address such themes as spatial patterns of drug use and addiction, interactions of social and environmental factors with biochemical processes of addiction, the use of GIS to better understand and respond to patterns of drug use and addiction, spatial diffusion modeling of addictive drug use and its changing characteristics, including predictive modeling, and much more.

A NIDA sponsored symposium entitled Adolescent Brain Development: Implications for Psychiatric Treatment has been accepted in the program for the American Psychiatric Association's Annual Meeting in Toronto, Ontario during May of 2006. The session will be chaired by Minda Lynch (BCSRB/DBNBR), with introductory remarks from David Shurtleff (OD/DBNBR). Larry Stanford (OD/DCNBR) will be the discussant. Speakers will discuss the prolonged maturation of frontal regions involved in decision making, judgment, and complex cognitive processes of executive function and attention. Neurobehavioral development in emotional regulation, behavioral inhibition, risk assessment, and the influence of "hot" and "cold" states of emotional arousal will be considered for potential clinical implications. Speakers include Drs. Ronald Dahl, Leslie Jacobsen, Isabelle Rosso and Bea Luna.

A NIDA sponsored meeting entitled National Cooperative Drug Discovery Groups for Nicotine Addiction - A Synthesis Meeting will be held on Feb 15, 2006 as a satellite to the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco's Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. The meeting will be chaired by Dr. William Corrigall (NIDA consultant), with introductory remarks by Drs. David Shurtleff (OD/DBNBR), and Allison Chausmer (BCSRB/DBNBR). Dr. Frank Vocci (OD/DPMCDA) will serve as a discussant. This NIDA-sponsored meeting will highlight research funded under the National Cooperative Drug Discovery Groups (NCDDG) initiative, which focuses on the need for mechanism-of-action based medications in nicotine addiction, for molecular tools for discovery research, and to facilitate partnerships between academic and pharmaceutical industry groups. Speakers include Drs. Linda Dwoskin, Maurizio Fava, Athina Markou, Frank I. Carroll, Palmer Taylor and Henry Lester. For more information, see http://conferences.masimax.com/srnt05/index.cfm.

Dr. Susan Volman, DBNBR, will chair a NIDA-sponsored symposium entitled Neurobiological Basis for Co-Occuring Substance Abuse and Other Psychiatric Disorders that has been accepted in the program for the American Psychiatric Association's Annual Meeting in Toronto, Ontario during May of 2006. The presentations will include human clinical and genetic studies and research using recently developed animal models of psychiatric illness that seek a neurobiological understanding for the high prevalence of concurrent substance abuse and other psychiatric disorders. Discussion will focus on how a better biological understanding could lead to improved treatment of dual-diagnosis disorders.

On March 26 - 29, 2006, Program Officers from several NIDA Divisions will participate in the Joint Meeting on Adolescent Treatment Effectiveness (JMATE) in Baltimore, MD. Multiple symposia and workshops are planned for this second annual meeting of clinicians and researchers with an interest in adolescent substance abuse treatment.

On April 23, 2006 in Atlanta, Georgia, the CTN will be sponsoring an all day pre-conference session entitled Treating People with Dignity and Evidenced Based Medicine - Emerging Research Findings on Buprenorphine, Hepatitis C and Prescription Drug Addiction at the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (AATOD) conference. Dr. Betty Tai will chair the session and Dr. Petra Jacob will be the discussant.

National CTN Steering Committee Meetings are planned for the following dates and locations: March 20-23, 2006, in Dallas, Texas, and October 2006 in Seattle, Washington.

The CTN has three invited sessions for the 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Clinical Trials May 21-24, 2006, in Orlando, Florida: 1) Analytical Issues Unique to Multi-Site Trials: Which Are Resolved and Which Are Still Controversial?; 2) Group Therapeutic Interventions for Drug Dependence and Mental Health: What questions to ask and how to design trials to answer them?; and 3) a workshop on Clinical Trials Networks.

Two CTN workshops will be held at the College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) Annual Meeting June 17-22, 2006, in Scottsdale, AZ. The workshops are entitled, 1) HIV/AIDS Research in the NIDA Clinical Trials Network: Emerging Results, and 2) Addressing Health Disparities Research in the CTN.