Welcome to the XVI Congress of the IUSSI
A message from Jacobus (Koos) Boomsma, IUSSI President
The organizing committee takes great pleasure in inviting you to participate in the XVI International Congress of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects (IUSSI), to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark from 8 to 14 August 2010.
The International Union for the Study of Social Insects IUSSI) was founded in the 1950s. The quadrennial World Congresses are the Union’s main activity and the Copenhagen 2010 Congress will be the 16th of these. The history of the Union reflects the developments that have characterized all of biology since the middle of the previous century. While the Union’s members in the early days identified themselves mostly from the kind of social insects they were interested in, later developments often emphasized specialisations such as ecology, evolution, behaviour, chemical communication, molecular biology and neuroscience, or conceptual paradigms such as inclusive fitness theory, self-organisation or disease resistance. Particularly the rapid advances in molecular and cell biology have revolutionized the study of social insects as can be seen when comparing the programs of the last five IUSSI congresses.
Over the years social insect research has made very significant contributions to the biological sciences, because insect societies allow researchers to address questions of general significance. In many ways, social insects have become “model systems” and the distinction between them and other biological models has become blurred. Advanced social behaviours have been discovered in other groups of organisms and the known genomes of other, non-social insects have turned out to be crucial for understanding the many parallel developments towards social life. In practice the Union’s profile has therefore been broadened to “the Study of Social Interactions”, where the social insects are prime model systems but no longer exclusive ones. Many young researchers working on social insects have obtained junior faculty positions in recent years, because they have exciting general research programs to offer, not because they work on ants, bees, wasps or termites.
More than ever before, IUSSI Congresses have become major dissemination and outreach events. Delegates still reconfirm each other in the excitement of studying social interactions, but they do so from an increasingly broad and interdisciplinary perspective, and they reach out to the larger scientific community and the lay public to show why their fundamental and applied science is interesting and relevant. The organisation of the Copenhagen Congress reflects these recent developments. Invited speakers and symposia have been carefully selected to fulfil these multiple purposes, and the poster sessions and social programs have been organised such that there are ample opportunities for exchange across fields and disciplines. The Congress program will also attempt to build explicit bridges to new fields of science that have the potential of cross-fostering research with the IUSSI community in the years to come.