By Cato T. Laurencin, M.D., Ph.D.

I am pleased to announce that the Regenerative Engineering Society will present the first “Rock Stars of Regenerative Engineering Conference.”

The conference is being hosted by the National Academy of Engineering at the Beckman Center in Irvine, California on December 10 and December 11, 2016.

The Regenerative Engineering Society is a new society focusing on the convergence of areas including advanced materials, stem cell science, physics, developmental biology and clinical translation for solving next generation challenges in tissue regeneration. The society recently has joined with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and is now one of its communities.

The Rock Stars of Regenerative Engineering will feature seven current exciting leaders of the field who will discuss their work in an interactive fashion. Poster sessions will allow younger investigators to interact, while there are plans to bring high school students to the meal events to allow networking with them.

We are excited about this new and innovative approach to the phrase “scientific meeting.” The conference is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

The call for poster abstracts is now open. Abstracts can be submitted through https://aiche.confex.com/aiche/rsre16/cfp.cgi.