The NORC, together with COAST, and the UCSF Diabetes Center has also grown our highly successful annual Metabolism, Obesity, and Diabetes Retreat that brings together the entire NORC community, including most notably a highly diverse set of trainees, from UCSF, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Touro University and the Buck Institute on Aging. In addition, the retreat includes an Advisory Board in order for the NORC to get critical mission feedback and to help strategize improvements and address concerns. The retreat allows the NORC to meet several goals:

1. It enables the NORC to maintain itself as a regional hub for scientific and educational exchange between institutions, as evidenced by the diverse institutional representation in our Pilot and Feasibility Program.
2. The Retreat supports the maintenance and growth of the newly funded joint UCSF-UC Berkeley T32 training grant in the area of “metabolic biology”.
3. It allows the NORC to focus on enhancing diversity, in particular at the level of highlighting trainees and their projects, junior faculty members, and individuals new to the fields of nutrition, metabolism, and obesity-related research.
4. It showcases the incredibly innovative and creative NORC-related science being conducted at UCSF and partner institutions.
5. Finally, the retreat is a venue to create new forms of scientific interaction that further spread ideas in this research area. For example, advisory board members from other NORCs who attend our retreat do so along with trainees from their respective labs and/or research groups, and these trainees are invited to join with our own in presenting their work during the retreat. This external participation will continue once more in 2024 and beyond.
6. The Retreat offers opportunities for the NORC enrichment mission to integrate with similar missions from related institutes in order to foster synergies. For example, the Retreat this year overlapped partially with the UCSF Cardiovascular Research Institute (CVRI) Annual Retreat. As such, we held an integrated program on the overlap day, with common programming reflecting the intersection of metabolic biology, nutritional science, obesity, and cardiovascular disease pathogenesis.

A copy of the program can be found here.