The first Hershey Conference on Developmental Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism was held in Hershey, PA as a satellite meeting of the XVIII International Symposium on Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, Brain 1997 held in Baltimore, MD in June 1997.  This first conference was a great success and generated tremendous enthusiasm for future meetings. This conference had 70 participants, both clinical and basic scientists, from the United States, Europe, Britain, Asia and Australia, of which 16 were invited participants. All of the invited speakers delivered platform presentations of their recent research. The majority of the registered participants submitted abstracts, the findings of which were presented in oral sessions or poster sessions. Presentations by graduate students, clinical and post-doc fellows were strongly encouraged and supported. The consensus of the participants was to hold future meetings every other year as a distinct conference from the Brain meetings. To avoid conflict with the Brain meetings it was decided to hold the Hershey Conference in alternate years and the next Hershey Conference was held again in Hershey, PA in June 2000.

The second meeting was another huge success and the unanimous vote was to hold it again. Starting from the second meeting on, the proceedings or a special issue were published in Developmental Neuroscience for all meetings.

The third meeting was held again in Hershey, PA in June 2002. The uniform response from that meeting was that this meeting was an excellent meeting and a truly unique forum for basic and clinical scientists in developmental neurobiology and brain injury. It was decided to continue the Hershey Conference on a biannual basis and to begin alternating the locations among West Coast, East Coast and Europe. Fresh NIH funding was obtained for the next three meetings with Susan Vannucci as P.I. and Donna Ferriero as co-I.

The fourth meeting was held at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, CA in June 2004. This meeting further established the uniqueness of this meeting. To highlight the growing importance of this meeting, a satellite meeting to the Hershey Conference was held for the first time, organized by United Cerebral Palsy on “Experimental Models of Cerebral Palsy” that had 13 invited speakers and 3 invited panelists and a NICHD representative.

The fifth meeting was held at Princeton, NJ in June 2006 with 85 registered participants and 17 speakers. This meeting continued to build upon the successes of the previous meeting and resulted in many new collaborations, stimulated new ideas and provided a boost to the careers of young investigators.

The sixth meeting was held at Ecquevilly France in June 2008. The responses from this meeting were overwhelming for this meeting set new standards in how a meeting should be conducted. In addition, a greater number of our European colleagues attended this conference for the first time, with a very positive outcome. In fact, there was such a high level of enthusiasm from the European community that it was decided that the Hershey Conference should alternate between the US and abroad with the European cohort covering the expenses for the latter. A survey of the participants was sent out and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.