More than 200 scientists, educators, students, journalists and bloggers will gather this weekend for ScienceOnline’09 — your experiences, knowledge, intellect and camaraderie will make this a fabulous conference.

Let’s take a moment to thank our sponsors for helping us to keep this event free:

Burroughs Wellcome Fund once again gave us a substantial grant to support the conference. BWFund is an independent private foundation dedicated to advancing the biomedical sciences by supporting research and other scientific and educational activities.

North Carolina Biotechnology Center once again provided us with a biotechnology event sponsorship grant. NCBiotech seeks to provide long-term economic and societal benefits to North Carolina by supporting biotechnology research, business and education statewide.

We are using the grants from BWFund and NCBiotech to give small travel stipends to our many session discussion leaders.

JMP Software once again provided a cash grant to help pay for our delicious lunch. JMP is a division of SAS, the leader in business intelligence and analytics — they’ve also donated a copy of their JMP 8 software (worth $1500), which we’ll have as a drawing prize on Saturday.

Science In the Triangle is a new sponsor this year. This site is an evolving experiment in community science journalism and scientific-community organizing. If you are based here in the Triangle, think about how you might collaborate with the site to spread news of your organization or research.

Blogads has sponsored many of our BlogTogether events over the last four years and once again made a donation to this conference. They pioneered blog advertising in 2002 and trail-blaze today.

We are using the donations from JMP, Science In the Triangle and Blogads to feed everyone, with good coffee in the morning and delicious sandwiches at lunch.

NC Museum of Life and Science, which last year arranged for the awesome grab bags, this year stepped up to be our institutional partner (to handle our funds). The museum exists to create a place of lifelong learning where people, from young child to senior citizen, embrace science as a way of knowing about themselves, their community, and their world (I’m there many weekends with my daughters).

Sigma Xi once again is hosting us — for free! — in their beautiful center. Sigma Xi was founded in 1886 to honor excellence in scientific investigation and encourage a sense of companionship and cooperation among researchers in all fields of science and engineering.

Enrico Maria Balli, who is traveling from Italy to join us, made a big cash donation via our PayPal button, and David Kroll, our co-organizer, keeps dipping into his own pocket to help make the conference unique.

Please show your gratitude to these sponsors and donors by visiting their sites and verbally thanking their representatives at the conference.

Other organizations, companies and individuals are volunteering or donating materials for the grab bag of science swag. We’ll thank each and every one of them by name soon after the conference. For now, though, a hearty thank you to the collective bunch for their efforts to make the event a success.

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