The event: As part of a NIH-wide initiative, the NIH is hosting "THE HUMAN MICROBIOME:  Emerging Themes at the Horizon of the 21st Century", a workshop exploring the promise and future of human microbiome research.

Date: August 16-18, 2017 

Time: 8:15/9 AM - 5 PM each day

Meeting website: https://commonfund.nih.gov/hmp/meetings/emerging

Livestream: For those in the Bethesda area, you can attend in person at the NIH, but for the rest of us, we can tune in remotely through a live webcast of the meeting. Here's the live videocast link for Day 1 (all upcoming videocast links here). And you can find the links for all 3 days in the NIH News Release here.

Agenda (quoting from the meeting site): 

"This 2017 NIH-wide microbiome workshop was organized by a planning committee of the trans-NIH Microbiome Working Group(TMWG), which includes program staff from the 19 NIH Institutes, Centers and Offices that support human microbiome research through their extramural portfolios. The TMWG is interested in taking stock of where the microbiome field stands after NIH’s ten-year investment in the Human Microbiome Project and evaluating what is needed for this field to advance over the next decade. This meeting will strive to cover advances that reveal the specific ways in which the microbiota influences the physiology of the host, in both a healthy and a diseased state, and how the microbiota may be manipulated, at either the community, population, organismal, or molecular level, to maintain and/or improve the health of the host. The goal of this workshop is to seek input from a trans-disciplinary group of scientists to identify (1) knowledge gaps, (2) technical hurdles, (3) new approaches, and (4) research opportunities which will inform the development of novel prevention and treatment strategies based on host/microbiome interactions over the next 10 years. The workshop closes with an Joint Agency Panel that includes the seven other government agencies which support human microbiome research activities human microbiome research activities to discuss areas of common interest and possible collaboration."

Schedule: The program (link here to the PDF file) looks to cover the current state of the field and emerging tools and models that can help to address outstanding questions.

So, whether you're in the lab, the office or just want a scientific break from your (surely, awesome) family vacation, come tune in and check out what's coming down the human microbiome pipeline.