The 2009 ION-NPAS-HKUST-NIMH Joint "Symposium on Frontiers in Neuroscience", between ION, NPAS (Neuroscience Program of Academia Sinica, Taibei), HKUST (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and NIMH (U.S. National Institute of Mental Health) was held at the SIBS Lecture Hall from September 24th to 27th.

On September 24th, the symposium started with a pre-workshop on "Ethics in Scientific Publication". Dr. Katja Brose, Editor in Chief of "Neuron", and Dr. Chun-Fang Wu, Editor in Chief of "Journal of Neurogenetics" respectively gave talks entitled "Research and Publication Ethics" and "You Don't Know How Lucky You Are: Intellectual Pursuit and Professional Integrity". Following the talks, Prof. Mu-Ming Poo (ION) chaired a round table discussion with the two speakers, Profs. Richard Nakamura (NIMH) and John Ngai (UC Berkeley), answering questions from researchers in the audience. 

From September 25th to 27th, 35 faculty members presented their recent works on topics including Neural Development, Neural Development & Plasticity, Neural Diseases, Synapse Formation & Plasticity, Neural Signaling and Diseases, and Neural Signal Processing. During the symposium, 57 posters from ION, NPAS and HKUST were also presented. The prizes for the top seven posters were awarded to Tong Wang (Zhen-Ge Luo's Lab, ION), Min Xu (Mu-Ming Poo's Lab, ION), Ye Yu (Tian-Le Xu's Lab, ION), Wen-Qin Hu (You-Sheng Shu's Lab), Hsu-Wen Chao (Yi-Ping Hsueh's Lab, NPAS), Jia-Dong Chen (Shu-Min Duan's Lab, ION) and Kai-Yu Wang (Zuo-Ren Wang's Lab, ION).