February 2024- A letter from the president
As I write this, it is a very exciting time for our society. Since our launch 14 years ago, S4SN has brought together social neuroscientists from all continents who study social processes across a wide variety of model species, including bats, coyotes, healthy human, and patient populations. My own first S4SN experience was in 2012, and I was immediately drawn in by the friendly and inclusive atmosphere and the strong translational focus, where the same or parallel phenomena were studied across species and with a variety of tools and behavioural assays. While our meetings have taken place on several continents, in recent years they have centered around the Society for Neuroscience meeting in the United States. Based on our experiences during the pandemic, when conferences were moved online and new audiences joined our meetings, we decided to try a new approach. The 2024 meeting is promising to be one of the largest Society for Social Neuroscience meetings in many years, and I look very much forward to meeting a new and more international crowd of social neuroscientists in Tsukuba, Japan, in March.
To give our conference attendees the best possible experience in Japan, our usual meeting time in October/November was shifted to cherry blossom season in late March. This meant a very short time has elapsed since the 2023 meeting, which was fully online. The society is trialing a new structure in which virtual meetings alternate with international in-person meetings in exciting locations all over the world. The location of the 2026 meeting has yet to be determined. If you have ideas and would like to help us organize this meeting, please reach out (admin@s4sn.org). We would also love to hear from you about the continued practice of virtual meetings. Personally, I love the hustle and bustle of in-person meetings, but virtual meetings open up the possibility of attendance for valuable members of our community who otherwise may be prevented from joining the international community due to, for instance, financial or family constraints.
As a relatively small society, we heavily rely on the work of our many volunteers. During my years as a board member, past president Steve Phelps provided a lot of expertise in running our society. I am extremely grateful to our board members, president-elect Steve Chang, and the chairs of the 2023 and 2024 program committees, Bess Lam and Monique Smith. The local organizing committee in Japan, led by Sonoko Ogawa, is currently hard at work to ensure we have the best possible experience when we come together as a society for the 2024 meeting. We have a wonderfully exciting program with excellent talks and a large cohort of very exciting abstracts to discuss during poster sessions. We have also set aside time in the schedule for fun excursions, a vital activity to foster a sense of community across the international crowd and to introduce many of us to aspects of Japanese culture for the first time. I very much look forward to seeing many of you in Tsukuba, and thank you for being a supportive member of our social neuroscience community.