We are pleased to announce the Cold Spring Harbor Asia conference on Novel Insights into Glia Function & Dysfunction which will be held in Suzhou, China, located approximately 60 miles west of Shanghai. The conference will begin at 7:00pm on the evening of Monday November 30, and will conclude in the evening after banquet on Thursday December 3, 2026.

The conference will include eight oral sessions and one poster session covering the latest findings across many topics in Glia. Many talks will be selected from the openly submitted abstracts on the basis of scientific merit and relevance. Social events throughout the conference provide ample opportunity for informal interactions.

Major Topics:

1. Development of glia

2. Glia-Neuron interaction, metabolism

3. Microglia

4. Astrocyte

5. Oligodendrocyte, NG2

6. The CNS disorders

7. Glia & Neurological Disease

8. Glia and peripheral talk

Keynote Speaker:

Christian Haass, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Invited Speakers:

Nicola Allen, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Mathew Blurton-Jones, University of California, Irvine

Zhihua Gao, Zhejiang University 

Tian-ming Gao, Southern Medical University

Florent Ginhoux, Gustave Roussy Hospital

Magdalena Götz, Helmholtz Center Munich, BMC LMU Munich

Helmut Kettenmann, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology/Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine

Baljit Khakh, University of California, Los Angeles

Hanjie Li, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, CAS

Brian MacVicar, University of British Columbia

Feng Mei, Third Military Medical University

Keith Murai, McGill University

Agnès Nadjar, University of Bordeaux

Klaus-Armin Nave, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences

Mami Noda, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Rosa Chiara Paolicelli, University of Lausanne

Xianhua Piao, University of California, San Francisco

Marco Prinz, University Hospital of Freiburg

Francisco Quintana, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Anne Schaefer, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Harald Sontheimer, University of Virginia

Hiroaki Wake, National Institute For Physiogical Sciences

Susanne Wolf, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin

LongJun Wu, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

We encourage abstracts to contain new and unpublished materials. The abstracts must be submitted electronically by the abstract deadline. Selection of material for oral and poster presentation will be made by the organizers. Status (fellow's talk/poster) of abstracts will be posted on our web site as soon as decisions have been made by the organizers. 

Fellowship: 
We are eager to have as many young people as possible attend since they are likely to benefit most from this meeting. A certain number of presentations by graduate students and postdocs in this conference will be selected as fellowship (USD $100-$500) awards. For more details, please visit  Stipends

We look forward to seeing you at Suzhou in November, 2026.