2009AnnualMeeting

      Our meeting will begin on Wednesday, January 14th, in Quito, Ecuador which is a dynamic
city with excellent hotels and services, and has vistas of snow-capped volcanoes. The next
day, after a short (2 hr) flight to the Galapagos, we will spend 5 days and 4 nights aboard an
excellent ship, the Galapagos Legend, cruising the islands. The first part of the meeting will be
held in Quito at the Hilton Colon where you will be staying. This arrangement makes it possible
for anyone who chooses not to go to the Galapagos Islands to attend a major part of the
meeting. The remainder of the meeting will be held on the Galapagos Legend.

    Featured speakers in Quito will include Miguel Nicolelis, M.D., Ph.D, Co-Director of the
Duke Center for Neuroengineering and Anne W. Deane Professor of Neuroscience, speaking
on, "Computing with Neural Ensembles", and Darrell G. Kirch, President and CEO, AAMC, who
you may recall made a dynamic presentation to us at an earlier meeting when he was Dean of
the Milton H. Hershey Medical Center, will speak on, "The Challenge of Being Chair in a New
Era". In addition, Michael Shipley and Richard Dey will report on the CAS, AAMC and
Biomedical Caucus meetings.

    Some of our own will make presentations on board the Galapagos Legend! Mike
Friedlander will conduct a session on what the proposed changes in Step One of USMLE will
mean for us. Charlie Blake will do a session on challenges to teaching, Gwen Childs and
Michael Shipley will run a session on “to tenure and from tenure” dealing with the issues of
obtaining and retaining a tenure-track appointment in the present funding climate.

    Outside of our meeting sessions will be presentations on the fauna and flora of the
Galapagos Islands. The emphasis on evolution seems particularly apt, given our commitment
to biology and the selective pressures under which we all operate. We are anticipating that
John Clark will have a session on Darwin. Among the professional biologists traveling with us
and making presentations on board the Galapagos Legend will be Robert Nansen, a talented
field biologist with a long association in the islands (who will also be our trip leader and many of
you will remember Bob from the recent Costa Rica meeting) and Thomas H. Fritts, Ph.D., a
Galapagos Giant Tortoise expert and president of the Charles Darwin Foundation.

    All of us will have comfortable exterior cabins and all meals with excellent food are included.
The ship is limited to 100 passengers which is the maximum allowed from a single ship to the
Galapagos islands. The ship has a good lecture room.

    Please click on this link to see a tentative conference schedule in Quito and Galapagos:
http://www.betchartexpeditions.com/cen-sa_galap_conf.htm At the bottom of the schedule for
the 2009 Quito/Galapagos conference are the prices for the conference. The rates start at
$3,150 per person (sharing a cabin) plus air fare from the USA to Quito, round trip
(approximately $650 from Miami) plus the AACBNC conference registration fee of $350 for
Regular Members & Sponsors, $200 for Emeritus Members, and $150 for accompanying
guests of members.

In this talk, I will review a series of recent experiments demonstrating the possibility of
using real-time computational models to investigate how ensembles of neurons encode
motor information. These experiments have revealed that brain-machine interfaces can be
used not only to study fundamental aspects of neural ensemble physiology, but they can
also serve as an experimental paradigm aimed at testing the design of modern
neuroprosthetic devices. I will also describe evidence indicating that continuous operation of
a closed-loop brain machine interface, which utilizes a robotic arm as its main actuator, can
induce significant changes in the physiological properties of neurons located in multiple
motor and sensory cortical areas. This raises the hypothesis of whether the properties of a
robot arm, or any other tool, can be assimilated by neuronal representations as if they were
simple extensions of the subject's own body.

The role of department chair in the academic medical center of the 21st century has
evolved from that of "senior scholar" to a position of broad executive responsibilities.
Aligning the resources of the department with overall institutional missions and goals can be
especially challenging, and the demands of mentoring and managing faculty and staff have
become formidable. Strategies will be discussed for successfully dealing with this
complexity. Even more importantly, the opportunities for chairs to achieve excellence while
exerting leadership in creating a more positive culture for their department, institution, and
academic medicine as a whole will be illustrated.