Dear Investigators,
The SFARI Spring 2022 Investigator Meeting is scheduled for April 11th through the 13th at the Simons Foundation in New York City. I am delighted that you can attend and, as the new SFARI Director, very much look forward to meeting all of you and learning more about your science.
The annual science meeting provides a unique opportunity to bring the SFARI community together to share recent discoveries and advances in autism research and to engage in lively and open discussions. We have organized the meeting to ensure time for individual presentations and for interactive group discussions and encourage your active participation throughout the meeting. We consider that collaborative and interdisciplinary studies, sharing of resources, inclusion of a diversity of perspectives and opinions, and rapid dissemination of discoveries through preprint servers and publications are all critical to achieving our shared mission of advancing the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders. I hope that you will use this meeting to establish new scientific collaborations and to hear about new tools, resources and scientific advances that may enhance your studies.
This year, we hope to continue the momentum from past meetings by sharing unpublished, and sometimes provocative, data, as well as new hypotheses that stimulate each of us to test and thereby advance the fields of brain and autism research. We will consider the event a success if you depart feeling intellectually rejuvenated, with an increased commitment to address the major scientific challenges that must be overcome to better understand brain function and to develop treatments for autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders.
I thank you in advance for sharing your data and contributing your scientific expertise, time and effort to these endeavors. All of us on the SFARI science team will also appreciate your feedback after the meeting. We want to make future meetings as stimulating and useful for you as possible and will welcome your recommendations for changes or improvements after the meeting. You will receive a questionnaire shortly after the meeting that you can use to provide these comments.
Finally, while we very much look forward to in person interactions with all of you, we are also carefully monitoring the pandemic to ensure that we can convene safely and will inform you if there are any changes in our in-person meeting plans.
We kindly ask that you register by Friday, March 4.
Very best regards,
Kelsey Martin, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, SFARI
Director, Simons Foundation Neuroscience Collaborations
