CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Nutrition and neuroscience are the major themes that will be examined at a conference on aging June 17 and 18 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The conference is being organized by the university’s Initiative on Aging, a multidisciplinary program that encourages scholarly collaboration among faculty researchers and students whose work focuses on increasing knowledge about the aging process. All conference sessions will take place at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, 405 N. Mathews Ave., Urbana.
“A wide range of disciplines are represented in the aging initiative at the University of Illinois,” said Wojtek Chodzko-Zajko (VOY-tek HODGE-koh-ZYE-koh), the head of the kinesiology department and a member of the initiative’s executive committee. “For our first annual conference, we’ve decided to focus on the areas of nutrition and neuroscience.
The university has a long tradition of outstanding, world-leading research in those areas. It’s difficult to imagine two more appropriate and important topics on which to focus our first conference.”
The conference begins at 7 p.m. on June 17 in the Beckman auditorium with a keynote address by Fred Turek, the director of the Center for Circadian Biology and Medicine and the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the department of neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern University. Turek will discuss the “Worried About Aging? Don’t Lose Sleep Over It.”
The following day’s activities will include a morning session on neuroscience topics, chaired by Paul Gold, professor of psychology and of psychiatry and a member of the Neuroscience Program at Illinois, and an afternoon session on nutrition research, chaired by John Erdman, nutrition research chair and professor of nutritional sciences at Illinois. A complete program, including scheduled speakers and registration information, is available on the Web.
