Diversity and Dissemination in Scientific Conferences

I've been swamped with service obligations these past few months, pretty much single-handedly organizing the SMBE Satellite Meeting on Eukaryotic -Omics at UC Davis (and a joint QIIME workshop) last month, as well as serving on the organizing committee for iEvoBio 2013. Both of these conferences aimed to emphasize interdisciplinary agendas (the SMBE meeting focused on high-throughput sequencing in eukaryotes, and iEvoBio on "big data" approaches in biology). But I'm consistently struck by the fact that interdisciplinary research never feels interdisciplinary enough--you're always wanting to reach a broader audience, connect with more diverse researchers, and spread the message of the conference as far and wide as possible.

Lately I've been reflecting on many issues I've encountered related to conference organization, diversity, and dissemination. Some things I've been asking myself lately as a conference organizer:

How do we balance out gender ratios and recruit female speakers? 

Female scientists represent a much smaller pool compared to their male counterparts. Scientists in general are over committed, and in my experience its been much harder to secure female speakers because they're fewer in number. For iEvoBio 2013, we decided early on that since we have an all-female organizing committee, we wanted all female keynote speakers (a nod to all the publicity about gender issues in science lately). We approached many different people on the iEvoBio speaker shortlist before finding our keynote speakers. In the end, the iEvoBio committee volunteered me (!) to speak because time was ticking and we just could not secure a second woman speaker. Senior women appear particularly trickly to nail down - we started sending out speaker requests back in Autumn 2012, a full eight months (!) before the event was happening, but still no dice. For the SMBE meeting, I had also started with an initial gender-balanced and career-stage balanced list, but as time went on this list became increasingly male-biased. So even if meeting organizers are committed to promoting gender diversity, you're grappling with many external factors that inherently seem to work against you.

How do we increase diversity at meetings? 

Increasing diversity encompasses a lot of things: ensuring a spectrum of career stages, balanced gender diversity, and participation from underrepresented groups. It has seemed much easier to ensure diversity of career stages (e.g. via travel awards for grad students and postdocs) than to ensure diversity in regard to gender and underrepresented groups. We had even advertised dedicated diversity awards for the SMBE meeting (travel awards targeting females and participants from underrepresented groups), but in the end we had a very small pool of applicants for these awards. I'm sure this is an advertising problem (I doubt I reached faculty at primarily undergrad institutes, or faculty at places like Historically Black Colleges), and a function of the gender/ethnicity ration amongst scientists, but overall I was left desperately searching for effective ways to increase diversity.

How do we advertise conferences? 

This is particularly a concern for interdisciplinary conferences (how do you recruit participants from disparate disciplines, when particularly when the organizers themselves are outside those target disciplines?) and newly established events (how do you get people to attend when new or one-off meetings aren't already marked on anyone's calendar). I really struggled with advertising the SMBE meeting, which fit both of these criteria. I sent out countless e-mail notifications to colleages and listservs, Tweeted meeting announcements, and blogged about the event. I've begged other people in my professional network to do the same. There's so many different channels but I never know what the right channels are--and there is often no way to gather data on what advertising strategies worked and what didn't. For advertising events, I often feel like I'm flailing around and hoping that people bite. How do you ensure that the information reaches the right eyes?

How do we minimize the administrative burden, particularly when scientist organizers have little/no admin support? 

After being buried by the administrating burden of the SMBE meeting, I've been mentally repeating that "I'm never organizing another conference ever again". I'm enthusiastic about meetings--I always learn a great deal from my peers and leave scientific events feeling inspired and motivated. I'm also perpetually optimistic that organizational and service activities won't be much of a time suck at all, as long as I gradually stay on top of things. However, I grossly underestimated the administrative duties for the SMBE meeting at UC Davis--travel reimbursements, room booking, alcohol permits, website updates, writing the program, sending e-mails, and collating abstracts--these all consumed my life in the weeks leading up to the meeting (and I was lucky to have help from our lab's admin support person). I worried about the meeting not running smoothly or the materials looking "thrown together" and having an unprofessional air, since I was doing all these organizational duties in my "spare" time outside of research. Perhaps running a meeting is easier for faculty members vs. postdocs (faculty may have admin staff of their own, but certainly grad students/postdocs who can share the organizing duties), but organizing even a small conference fundamentally requires a lot of admin duties regardless of the type of the event.

I don't have  answers to any of the above questions - only observations and thoughts based on my own experiences. I'd love to hear comments and suggestions from the community - please discuss!

Wrap up of the #SMBEeuks meeting and QIIME workshop at UC Davis

Thanks to everyone who attended the SMBE Satellite Meeting on Eukaryotic -Omics at UC Davis last week (April 29 - May 2, 2013). The event was a resounding success - it was wonderful to meet participants from such diverse backgrounds, working on different aspects of eukaryotic genomics and biodiversity studies. Many thanks to meeting sponsors SMBE, MOBIO and Illumina for their generous financial support. Fingers crossed for other similar meetings in the future! 

For reference, all meeting documents are available here:

• Meeting program PDF
• Abstract book PDF
• List of registered participants (Names, e-mails, affiliations, and Twitter usernames)

Twitter discussions that took place at the meeting each day have been compiled using Storify (a great online tool that collects tweets before Twitter locks them away in their archive):

• #SMBEeuks - Day 1 Storify (compiled by Jonathan Eisen)
• #SMBEeuks - Day 2 Storify (compiled by Jonathan Eisen)
• #SMBEeuks - Days 3 and 4 Storify (complied by Holly Bik) 

Some speakers have posted their slides online - hopefully I can expand this list as I convince more participants to share their talks and posters (updated 5/18):

• Meeting welcome and overview of Eukaryotic -Omics at UC Davis - Holly Bik
• The need for a phylogeny-driven genomic encyclopedia of Eukaryotes (slides only) - Jonathan Eisen (alternate YouTube link here - for slides and recorded audio)
• The pro-shotgun-assembly talk - C. Titus Brown
• Predicting loci of functional evolution within ancestral genes - Victor Hanson-Smith
• Composition of the Maize Endophytic Microbiome is Correlated with Maize Genotype - Surya Saha
• Next-generation sequencing for microbial ecology: alpha diversity, beta diversity, and biases in high-throughput sequencing - Rachel Adams
• Host-associated eukaryotic communities - Laura Wegener Parfrey

On Thursday morning we held breakout group sessions to discuss the overall themes at the #SMBEeuks meeting, and put forward some recommendations for increasing the pace of scientific progress in Eukaryotic -Omics fields. A general discussion took place before we broke off into two smaller groups for more specific discussions. Notes are posted here:

• Breakout questions and notes from the general group discussion (PDF)
• "Amplicon group" breakout notes (PDF)
• "Genomes group" breakout notes (PDF)

Finally, my deepest thanks to Laura Wegener Parfrey, Tony Walters, and Adam Robbins-Pianka for running a fantastic QIIME workshop after the #SMBEeuks meeting. We had a packed room of eager biologists who were ready to pick up some command line expertise. QIIME workshop documents are posted below - additional thanks to microBEnet and the Alfred P. Sloan foundation who supported this workshop!

• QIIME workshop agenda
• List of participants at QIIME workshop (names, e-mails and affiliations)

SMBE Meeting on Eukaryotic -Omics: April 29-May 2 at #UCDavis

The website is built, speakers have been lined up, and we're ready to announce it to the world:

Myself, along with my former PI Kelley Thomas at the University of New Hampshire, received funding from the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution to host an SMBE Satellite Meeting focused on Eukaryotic -Omics at UC Davis this spring. The meeting dates have been set as April 29-May 2, 2013, and the meeting description is as follows:

The SMBE Satellite Meeting on Eukaryotic -Omics will bring together an interdisciplinary pool of researchers to discuss current efforts, challenges, and future directions for high-throughput sequencing approaches focused on microbial eukaryotes (environmental studies of non-model organisms). The meeting program will encompass investigations of eukaryote biodiversity, ecology, and evolution, using approaches such as rRNA marker genes, shotgun metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and computational biology tools and software pipelines.

See the meeting website (http://www.smbe.org/eukaryotes/) for program announcements, registration details, and travel award information. We're currently in talks to tack on a QIIME workshop at the end of the meeting (tentative dates May 2-4), so keep an eye our for further details. The official conference hashtag will be #SMBEeuks on Twitter.

STEM diversity has been on my mind a lot lately, particularly given the Eisen lab's obsession with equality in gender representation. So I'm very excited to announce that our call for travel award applications includes a heavy focus on diversity--encouraging early-career applicants as well as those from underrepresented groups. Deadline for abstract submission and travel grant applications is Feburary 22, 2013 - mark it on your calendars!