By: Angie Laird, PhD, NITRC Domain Expert 

Hi! I’m sitting at the airport in Washington DC, waiting for a flight to take me back home to Miami. The inaugural ABCD Insights and Innovations Meeting (AIIM) has just ended and I’m so excited to talk about the amazing research I’ve heard about over the past two days. 

AIIM was hosted at the NIH Campus in Bethesda, Maryland, on March 4-5, 2024. The meeting was designed for researchers to share innovative findings and emerging insights about adolescent development through use of data generated by the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. AIIM was intended to foster collaboration among scientists from multiple disciplines and career stages and provide opportunities for sharing novel perspectives through data presentations, roundtable discussions, and interactive poster sessions. The meeting also provided opportunities for attendees to connect with members of the ABCD consortium and NIH program staff.

What an incredible meeting! There were so many inspiring and exciting presentations on the schedule. I saw lots of interesting applications of ABCD data on cognition, psychopathology, and substance use, as well as cool new methodological advances. 

Throughout the meeting, I connected with many graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career faculty and was truly impressed by these thoughtful and talented researchers. There were panel discussions, flash talks, and an “Ask The Experts” session. The first afternoon included an informative session with NIH program officers from NIDA, NIMH, NIAAA, NIMHD, and NIHLBI, while the second day included a series of outstanding presentations from members of the START cohort - if you’re not familiar with the START ABCD Training Program, you should definitely take a look! 

As a neuroimager, I tend to think of ABCD as a data resource for neuroimagers about adolescent brain development. So, I found it interesting that this wasn’t a typical “neuroimaging conference”. Sure, many researchers are incorporating brain-based phenotypes into their work, but many others are not. What *is* trending? Well, researchers are collectively leveraging ABCD's rich data that contextualizes the adolescent experience, including variables related to the structural and social determinants of health. These include variables at the individual, family, and community levels. ABCD is a unique resource that has captured many socioenvironmental variables not addresssed in other population-based neuroimaging studies. Moreover, ABCD includes a demographically diverse cohort. As an ABCD site PI, it’s quite gratifying to see so many scholars take advantage of these data and ask societally meaningful questions related to the impacts of childhood poverty, gender diversity, and neighborhood disadvantage. There was also a lot of compelling work centered around sleep, which plays such a critical role during adolescent development. Overall, ABCD presents a novel opportunity to look beyond simple trends in race and ethnicity and consider persons in their lived environments, using linked datasets and allowing for the consideration of different theoretical approaches. Such work will help us all better understand pathways to prevention and intervention, as well as policies for societal level factors that cause health inequities. 

It’s not often that you attend a meeting in which everyone is working with the same dataset, yet in such different ways! I’m told that the AIIM website will be updated in the next few days with more information on presentations and resources. 

Special thanks to Traci Murray, Caitlin Dudevoir, Susan Holbrook, and many others at NIH who did a fantastic job organizing the meeting and making it so successful. I am returning home energized with new ideas and I’m ready to tackle more ABCD data projects. 

The plan is for AIIM to be an annual event, so I will see you there next year!