About This Meeting:

Our basic external sensory systems—touch, taste, vision, hearing, and smell—enable us to perceive the world around us, while internal sensory systems enable us to perceive the world within us. Recent advances have revealed the molecular logic of how some sensory systems work, while other sensory systems remain uncharted. Fields of sensory biology often maintain separate cultures and are at varying levels of maturity, with different frontiers, unknowns, and perspectives. 

This Keystone Symposia conference on Sensory Systems: Interoception and Exteroception will bring leading experts from different sensory fields together to broadcast conceptual and technical advances achieved in one sensory system that may enable new findings in others. The meeting will highlight recent advances in external senses—vision, olfaction, taste, hearing, and touch/pain/temperature sensation—as well as new developments in the emerging field of internal organ sensation. Topics to be discussed include: receptors and sensory mechanisms; neural circuits; behavioral and physiological responses; and the genetic basis of sensory deficits. 

Joint sessions with the Keystone Symposia conference on Neurobiology of Appetite Control will create new opportunities to connect sensory neuroscience with emerging insights into feeding behavior, energy balance, and metabolic disease. By convening leading experts across different sensory fields, this meeting fosters cross-disciplinary collaboration and enables the exchange of molecular, mechanistic, and technical insights across traditionally distinct research communities. 

This meeting positions itself as a unique forum that integrates knowledge across sensory biology, bridging external and internal sensation and enabling researchers from different sensory fields to advance their own work through discoveries and approaches developed elsewhere in sensory science. 

In the video below, Dr. Stephen Liberles, PhD from Harvard Medical School and Dr. Vanessa Ruta, PhD from The Rockefeller University, talk about what to expect from this meeting and why you should attend:

Also, check out some of the speaker highlights for this meeting: