An important component of the Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Program is fostering collaboration and communication throughout California, both for scientists and the lay public. The primary mechanism for accomplishing this is through an annual meeting. The Roman Reed Research Meeting, which grew out of the California Spinal Cord Injury / Neural Regeneration Consortium Meeting, is held in March each year and draws more than 150 participants from throughout California.
The kick off event is a session devoted to education, for both lay people and researchers. The "Meeting the Scientists" forum is attended 50-50 by individuals with spinal cord injury, their families and caretakers and by scientists who study spinal cord injury. Short public oriented research presentations are followed by extensive Q&A. The goal of the session is for education to go both ways wit scientists informing the public about cutting edge research and the public informing the research community about issues of particular importance that can then be taken into the lab for study.
The second day of the meeting is devoted to presentations by that year's Roman Reed Research Award recipients. Because the grants start in January, Roman Reed Researchers do not have much time to collect data before the conference. They do, however, have excellent projects that are in the initial stages. So, rather than present information that had been found, the speakers present the background of their state funded projects and outlined those projects for the California SCI research community. The idea being that by presenting projects at the beginning rather than at the end, the SCI research community is able to add to those projects and make them even stronger. The response to this method, which is very much not the norm for scientific meetings, has been well received and several projects have been augmented through interacting with the researchers in attendance.
An additional poster session provides a forum for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, the future of SCI research, to present their work.
