The Annual Gatlinburg Conference on Research and Theory in ID
CONFERENCE RECAP
“Rare Genetic/Monogenic Disorders & Co-Occurring Conditions in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities”
Each year, Gatlinburg brings together numerous behavioral scientists from around the world to discuss their research and collaborations in related fields such as intellectual and developmental disabilities. While it is a smaller conference, the attendees represent all professional levels and include students, post-docs, support and research staff, professors, and researchers. Our Pharma Services team also attended, excited to learn about the important and ground-breaking research being conducted in the IDD sphere.
2023 Gatlinburg Conference overview
This year’s conference featured opening remarks by John Colombo, Rodney Samaco, and Eric Storch, followed by updates from the NICHD IDD Branch. We all had the opportunity to choose from various workshops, poster presentations, round table discussions, and plenary sessions throughout the conference. The intimate setting enabled us to have meaningful conversations with other industry professionals.
We attended several workshops that highlighted the developments in research related to rare genetic diseases and learned a lot from them, including one on Angelman Syndrome, SCN2A-Associated Developmental and Epileptic Encephalopathy.

The various expert speakers and poster presentations revealed some key findings about using Growth Scale Values (GSVs) in research to measure change over time. The use of Growth Scale Values was a topic of interest for many of the attendees seeking a metric superior to raw scores and age equivalents when using the Bayley®-III/4 and Vineland™-II/3 as clinical outcome assessments (COAs).