This application seeks funding for a research meeting entitled "Placenta Association of the Americas Satellite Meeting", to be held immediately prior to the annual Society for Gynecologic Investigation meeting, on March 20, 2002. The meeting will take place from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm in the SGI conference hotel, the Century Plaza in Los Angeles, CA. The objective of the meeting is to provide a forum for the presentation of new molecular, biochemical, cellular, and clinical studies relevant to placental function in health and disease. This meeting is part of an annual series of one-day satellite meetings designed to provide a regular venue for the presentation of new research data and for interaction between clinical and basic scientists and between established investigators and junior researchers. The low cost of registration and proximity to the Society for Gynecologic Investigation annual meeting are factors which it is hoped will encourage attendance by junior investigators and others who might not otherwise be exposed to this area of research. The meeting format is six hour-long presentations on current and/or important topics in placental, trophoblast or related research fields. Two general themes will be selected for this meeting and three speakers will be asked to present on each theme. For this meeting, as for the previous meetings in this series, experts in a particular field will be invited to provide and overview of their field followed by presentation of the latest research. In addition adequate time is provided for discussion and questions so that the interaction between conference participants is maximized. Funding is being requested for this meeting so that we can continue to improve the quality and range of the research being presented. At present we are limited to speakers who can pay their own expenses for attendance at the meeting. This limits the potential pool of speakers and we are therefore requesting funds to cover the travel expenses of the invited speakers so that we can invite the best researchers in a particular field to present at these meetings. These meetings have been very successful previously and continue to grow in size; we had approximately 200 attendees last year and expect to exceed that at the next meeting.