The executive committee of “Breathing for Life: 16th Oxford Conference on Breathing, Emotion, and Beyond” is programming 16th iteration of this important meeting according to 5 guiding principles:

• Unifying the community after several years of isolation during the pandemic

• Encouraging the next generation of early-career scientists and trainees

• Enhancing the diversity of presenters by via gender parity and geographic location of home institutions

• Celebrating and disseminating recent breakthroughs in understanding the generation and control of breathing as well as how breathing intersects with emotional and cognitive brain functions

• Expanding the tent to embrace cross-disciplinary approaches that pertain to, and inform, our understanding of breathing and its neural underpinnings

We will accomplish the first point by being together and sharing ideas in scientific and social contexts. We will accomplish the second point by innovative programming, with trainees featured in all sessions, and a subset of sessions dedicated to trainee presentations. Additionally, we will include a “Meet the PI” section, giving trainees a unique opportunity to interact with senior researchers. We will accomplish the third point by balancing for gender in all presentations and by recruiting research presentations from institutions all over the world. We will accomplish the fourth point by making a selected small number of invited platform presentations from researchers with proven track records and recent breakthrough discoveries, while selecting the vast majority of the presentations from the submitted abstracts. We will accomplish the fifth point by inviting breathing-adjacent scientists to join the meeting (maybe for the first time) and share their work about the impact of breathing on other important brain functions like emotion (anxiety, fear, etc), cognition, and pathologies at the intersection of breathing and neurodegenerative diseases.

As the programming proceeds we ask you the community to help us strengthen the program in every way by submitting your abstracts and registering for the meeting.