The Gordon Research Conference on Visual System Development is a biennial meeting that brings together investigators using invertebrate (primarily Drosophila) and vertebrate animal models to study the development and evolution of the eye and visual system. This is the 4th time this conference is being organized under the auspices of the GRC, having been reconfigured from the Drosophila Visual System Development Workshop first held in 1992. The scope of the workshop was expanded to include vertebrate model systems in 1994, when a seminal paper from Walter Gehring's laboratory showed that an orthologous gene (eyeless/Pax6) specifies eye formation in flies and vertebrates, respectively. Over the years, this meeting has provided a forum to explore the similarities - and differences - between the two visual systems.

The GRC Visual System Development conference provides a highly interactive and stimulating venue for cross-fertilization of ideas between the invertebrate and vertebrate scientific communities. Our goal is to generate an appreciation of common principles that mediate the construction and function of the visual system in diverse organisms and to share the latest exciting new ideas and concepts. Topics to be discussed at the conference will include evolutionary diversity and gene regulation, specification and determination of retinal cell fate, developmental patterning mechanisms, axonal guidance of retinal and central connections, neural circuits that mediate visual behavior, molecular control of morphogenesis, stem cells and regeneration. Speakers will represent a range of disciplines, model systems and approaches, and all participants are encouraged to present a poster. Poster sessions will include chalk talks by leaders in the field who will synthesize their ideas with those presented in posters and in talks.