Meiosis Gordon Conference: Gregory Copenhaver

As part of its mission to encourage engagement within the genetics community, PLOS Genetics is sponsoring a number of conferences and meetings this year. In order to raise awareness about these conferences and the researchers who attend them we are featuring a number of these conferences on Biologue, with posts written by the organizers or PLOS Genetics editors who are involved.

The third of these conferences is the Meiosis Gordon Research Conference, which takes place in New London between the 1^st and 6^th of June. We hear from Gregory Copenhaver, PLOS Genetics co-Editor-in-Chief, about organizing the conference and the areas of research that he finds exciting.

I’m Gregory P. Copenhaver, co-Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Genetics, and together with my vice-Chair, Neil Hunter, I’m organizing the Meiosis Gordon Research Conference (GRC) to be held at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH on June 1-6, 2014. The conference has been held biennially for 22 years with an over-arching goal of presenting the most cutting-edge, unpublished research on the fundamental mechanisms that ensure the stable inheritance of the genome during meiotic cell divisions.  The program comprises 9 plenary sessions that broadly address current issues in meiotic recombination, meiotic progression and cell cycle checkpoints, epigenetic control of meiotic processes, regulation of meiotic gene expression, chromosome pairing and synapsis, sister chromatid cohesion, chromosome interactions with the nuclear envelope, chromosome segregation, and the evolution and natural variation of meiotic processes. The meiosis GRC is paired with a sister meeting – the Meiosis Gordon Research Seminar – that is organized and attended by graduate students and postdocs.  This pair of conferences brings together scientists from around the world and at all career stages to push the leading edge of innovation and knowledge in this critical area fundamental biology.

Meiosis is the definitive set of processes for sexually reproducing organisms, and it is near and dear to my heart since it is the central focus of my lab.  The Meiosis Gordon Conference is the premier scholarly meeting in the field and this year promises to be packed with exciting, hot-off-the-press science. In addition, the meeting will continue a strong tradition of promoting diversity at all levels – career stage, gender, organismal system and geographic distribution.  It’s great that PLOS can support the dissemination of some of the newest research in genetics by being a sponsor of this meeting – it’s a wonderful dovetailing of two organizations (PLOS and the Gordon Conferences) that have both had a huge influence on promoting excellent science.