Boston Bacterial Meeting (BBM) 2009 will take place Thursday June 18 – Friday June 19 at the Harvard University Science Center. The meeting will feature ~25 oral and 60+ poster presentations by students and postdocs representing diverse arenas of bacterial research, including cell and molecular biology, development, pathogenesis, ecology, and evolution. The BBM2009 Keynote Address will be delivered by our own Dr. Richard Losick, Harvard College Professor and Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology.

BBM was founded in 1995 by two former Losick lab postdocs, Kit Pogliano and Karen McGovern, with the goal of bringing together the community of bacteriologists from the greater Boston area so that they could present their work and share ideas. BBM, now in its 15th year, has proven to be a vibrant meeting, attended not only by bacteriologists from the Boston area, but also from further reaches of New England including New Hampshire, New York, and Connecticut.

In keeping with its roots, every detail of the meeting is planned and organized by graduate students and postdocs from Harvard (main campus and HMS), MIT, and Tufts. The chair of the BBM2009 organizational committee is Elizabeth Shank, a postdoc in Roberto Kolter’s lab at HMS.

MCB has also provided significant support to BBM: Richard Losick was instrumental in helping found BBM and continues to be an extraordinarily supportive faculty sponsor; Lilah Rahn-Lee and Amy Hitchcock Camp, both members of the Losick lab, serve on the BBM organizational committee; and finally, Jennifer Kingsbury in the MCB Financial Office has been indispensable in handling BBM transactions.

BBM also receives sponsorship from several local and national biotech and pharma companies: AstraZeneca, New England Biolabs, Pfizer, Novartis, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Bioenergy International, Blue Sky Biotech, Microbia, Novobiotic Pharmaceuticals, Primera DX, Agilent Technologies, and Microbiotix are all supporting BBM2009. For details on BBM2009 and to register, please visit www.mcb.harvard.edu/losick/bbm