2024 Annual Conference Grant: American Society of Preventive Oncology

The mission of the American Society of Preventive Oncology (ASPO) is the exchange and translation of scientific information to reduce the cancer burden and for the continued development of investigators involved in cancer prevention and control. The 48th ASPO Annual Meeting will be held at the Swissôtel Chicago, March 17-19, 2024. The specific aims of the annual meeting and this conference grant are to: 1) provide multidisciplinary forums for the exchange of scientific information; 2) foster implementation and broaden dissemination of scientific discoveries; and 3) provide exceptional professional development to investigators at any career stage, but especially early career investigators, to maximize their potential for success. This application requests partial support for the 2024 Annual Meeting, which is a keystone of this multidisciplinary organization and the preventive oncology community. ASPO’s annual meeting provides a high-quality program that fosters new opportunities for early career, mid-career, and senior investigators whose careers are focused on the primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention of cancer. The 2024 Meeting consists of 4 symposia, 2 lunch roundtable sessions, 2 award lectures, 4 Special Interest Group breakfast sessions, a networking mixer, two poster sessions, and a Community Science program that fosters community engagement. As we near ASPO’s 50th anniversary, this year we added a new session type - a new format we are calling “Looking back, thinking forward”, these sessions are kicked off by a senior investigator and followed by 4 junior investigator or trainee flash talks selected from abstract submissions. Pre-meeting workshops include multiple professional development sessions, a meeting of cancer center Associate Directors and Program Leaders for Cancer Prevention and Control, and a meeting for NCI training grant directors. Meeting planning takes satisfaction surveys from previous annual meetings into account. Abstracts will be solicited beginning in August 2023. The 16 abstracts receiving the highest peer reviewed rankings will be published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, and presented during paper sessions and the poster session. Multiple initiatives including this conference grant—which requests travel support for minority investigators, early career scientists, and community scientists/advocates—enhance the diversity of the meeting attendees, program committee, and invited speakers. All meetings are held in non-smoking, ADA accessible conference facilities. Journal and online advertisements, email, and direct mail will publicize the meeting. Over 400 participants are expected to attend. Speakers and participants are from multiple disciplines in cancer prevention and control research and represent fields concerned with translating evidence into effective prevention and control programs. By fostering communication among multidisciplinary professionals, ASPO meetings have been extraordinarily successful at reaching the Society’s goals of supporting mentoring, encouraging dialogue, and promoting innovative progress in cancer prevention and control.