The Good Wolf team attended the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in San Diego
What is the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting?
For six days in November, members of the Good Wolf core team, led by Founder John Delfs, descended upon the San Diego Convention Center to staff an exhibition and join the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience – the largest gathering of neuroscientists in the world.
This year marked the first time since 2019 that the meeting was held in-person. A total of 24,351 individuals – almost all neuroscientists or students of neuroscience – spent seven days attending 854 workshops and meetings and wandering through the Convention Center exhibition hall.
Our goal was to talk about Good Wolf to the national neuroscience community in order to gauge the interest in, and appetite for, the work we do. As a relatively new organization that is gearing up to expand our reach and impact, this annual meeting gave us a rare opportunity to conduct a reality check among one of our key constituencies. Was our premise valid? Were we filling a gap? What are we missing?
Good Wolf’s reception at the conference
Each day, from 9:00 am until 5:00 pm, Good Wolf staff spoke with between 300 to 400 individuals on our exhibition stand – about their own work, interest in collaborating with us and in being part of a Scientific Advisory Board, and to hear their feedback about the mission and goals of Good Wolf. In the process we built a mailing list of over 300 interested individuals.
We were both delighted and astonished by the positive and enthusiastic response we received from neuroscientists, educators, potential funders and graduate students from around the world. We discovered, particularly among graduate students and those beginning their careers in neuroscience, a hunger for making their work relevant and useful to a wider community, and for communicating to a broader public. Many established neuroscientists were intrigued by Good Wolf’s mission, with some expressing an interest in becoming part of the Scientific Advisory Committee.
What’s next?
We left San Diego excited and energized by the responses we received. Thank you to all those who came to visit us at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. The experience has confirmed our belief that this work is important and vital, and that it fills a gap within the current network of neuroscience-based organizations. We also feel humbled about the work that lies ahead and about our responsibility to identify how to effectively and strategically harness this interest and enthusiasm.
Stay tuned.
