2018 Meeting of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement

Movement is essential for enabling us to interact with the world. All behaviors, including speech, writing, reaching, grasping, walking and posture require the coordinated activities of many motor areas. Further, sensory signals provide essential feedback to these motor areas, enabling accurate motor control and motor learning, as well as providing information vital for deciding future behaviors. As a result, understanding the sensorimotor control of even seemingly simple movements like reaching out to pick up a glass of water is complex. Damage to these sensorimotor pathways can produce a wide range of debilitating neurological disorders including tremor, Parkinson's disease, ataxia, dystonia, and spasticity - all of which markedly decrease patient quality of life. The Society for the Neural Control of Movement (NCM) is an international community of scientists, clinician-investigators and students all engaged in research whose common goal is to understand how the brain controls movement in health, and to address the deficits that occur in disease. NCM promotes a broad range of research using interdisciplinary approaches (e.g., neurophysiological, anatomical, molecular, computational, and behavioral), different animal models, and studies of normal subjects and patients with neurological disorders. The inaugural NCM Meeting took place in 1991. The success of the society and its annual meeting has led to a continual growth in membership, meeting attendance, and the breadth of scientific content. With support through the NIH, the 2018 NCM meeting will make substantive progress towards furthering three main goals of the society: Aim 1) Stimulate new research approaches and collaborations among NCM meeting attendees by identifying new topics and appropriate scientists as speakers, Aim 2) continue to increase the gender and ethnic diversity within the NCM leadership and in meeting programing, and Aim 3) promote and support the development of the next generation of motor control researchers by providing financial and career support for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Overall, the unique format of the annual NCM meeting, with its focus on interdisciplinary approaches, discussion, and scientific interaction in an intimate meeting environment, is of immeasurable value to furthering worldwide understanding of how the brain controls movement in both health and disease.