WELCOME

GREETINGS from the Pacific Northwest USA!

We are exceptionally pleased to invite you to attend the 7th World Congress on Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) on September 18–21, 2011 in Portland, Oregon, USA.

We are equally proud to welcome you to the stunning natural landscapes of Oregon — mighty rivers, dramatic glacier-cut gorges, Douglas-fir forests, scenic mountains, and a ruggedly beautiful coastline. We are truly excited to share with you the charming, visually and ecologically green, gastronomically acclaimed, and downright quirky delights of Portland, a gem of a place with the sensibility of a small town and the incomparable perks of a great city.

We have crafted the 7th World Congress on DOHaD to immerse you not only in the latest knowledge of the traditional spheres of this growing field, but also in newly emerging areas (e. g. innate immunity; gut microbiomics) that will inevitably impact our understanding of developmental programming.

Opening and Closing Plenary Sessions will address global challenges, showcase templates for successful public health interventions, and consider how science, public health policy, and political sectors can come together to implement change. The unique and critical role of the placenta as the maternal-fetal interface, impacting all types of programming results and outcomes, and its emerging potential as an accessible and powerful biomarker of future disease will be addressed in a plenary session to alert all to its potential in research and practice. We will highlight the preterm infant for the first time in the Congress series, in an attempt to define optimal postnatal organ development and understand how traditional management of this medically challenging period might contribute to programming. Parallel and Poster sessions will address a broad spectrum of topics to provide forums for all avenues of ongoing work in the DOHaD field.

On behalf of the Organizing Committee,

Susan P. Bagby, MD
Chair, Organizing Committee
Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon USA

Organizing Committee: Kent Thornburg, PhD,
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU)

David J.P. Barker, MD, PhD,
OHSU and University of Southampton, UK

Dennis M. Bier, MD,
Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas