Two great professional societies — One great regional conference!
Much like the Kentucky Derby packs a lot of excitement in two short minutes of horse racing, we are going to be packing a ton of Anatomy and Physiology into one fabulous conference day and you can bet you won’t want to miss it! The American Association for Clinical Anatomists (AACA) and the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS) invite YOU to attend our first ever Joint AACA/HAPS Regional Conference at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY (home of the Kentucky Derby!) on Saturday, March 30, 2019. Great speakers, workshops, posters, and even multiple cadaver lab experiences await you. The last day to register at the Early Bird registration rate and submit a workshop or poster proposal is March 1, 2019.
How did this joint venture get started? In the fall of 2015, I moved from Houston, TX to Louisville, KY and I met Dr. David Porta in the Biology Department at Bellarmine University. He was teaching Gross Anatomy and I was teaching Vertebrate Physiology and we both were teaching Human Anatomy & Physiology. As David showed me where lab supplies were and we small talked, we discovered we both served on the boards of professional societies, AACA for him and HAPS for me. Because we obviously weren’t busy enough and we thought there would be some synergy between the interests of AACA and HAPS, we hatched an idea to co-host a regional meeting. We had round table discussions with a few more anatomists from Bellarmine and the University of Louisville and we outlined what we think will be a great conference for instructors of Anatomy and Physiology. Here’s a glimpse of the platform presentations and cadaver workshop opportunities.
Dr. Jeffrey Petruska will be presenting research on neural connectivity recently discovered by using modern molecular techniques combined with old school classical neurophysiology and gross anatomy observations. My co-host Dr. David Porta will be presenting his research on the biomechanical techniques used to analyze different types of bone fractures and how this data has been used as legal evidence in hit-and-run as well as malpractice cases. David will offer coordinating workshops in the cadaver lab where participants will extract bone, mount it on the fracturing apparatus, and then analyze the fragments.
Hope to see you in Louisville!
Rachel Hopp
Conference Co-Host Rachel Hopp, PhD, Department of Biology, University of Louisville, Southern Regional Director of HAPS
Conference Co-Host and Update Speaker David Porta, PhD, Department of Biology, Bellarmine University, Past Program Secretary of AACA
Update Speaker Jeffrey Petruska, PhD, Department of Anatomical Sciences & Neurobiology, Member of the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, University of Louisville School of Medicine