About:

As Event Manager and Technical Director for ISB’s Virtual Microbiome Series, I led the event’s core organizing team, ran production operations, and was responsible for overall project management throughout the event’s lifecycle.

Event Evolution During a Pandemic: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

When ISB, along with the rest of the world, had to cancel all of our in-person events in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw an opportunity to try something novel. It was clear that we needed to adapt our events for the present, but we also needed to strengthen them for the future. I proposed an idea to one of our faculty members: “Let’s host a virtual microbiome series.” He agreed, and we haven’t looked back since.

Along with my faculty counterpart, I led an internal team of fifteen scientists and administrative staff in organizing every facet of this series. I ran bi-weekly project meetings, developed production schedules, advanced speakers, scheduled code run-throughs, led dress-rehearsals, communicated with attendees and was respsonible for onsite livestream production.

The series includes two events - an intensive computational course led by ISB scientists and a symposium featuring prominent microbiome researchers from across the world. Both events were virtual and free in order to make them as globally accessible as possible. An internet connection was the only requirement to participate. The intended audience was graduate students, postdocs, principal investigators, industry scientists, educators, clinicians, or any other variety of microbiome-curious person from across the globe.

By the numbers

We had remarkable growth in attendance for this series in the past two years. We went from 713 registered attendees in 2020 to 2,274 in 2021, which is a 219% increase. There were 81 countries represented from around the world, as well as 45 US states. I’ve created a Tableau Public dashboard that visualizes this registration data and outlines how successful this series was: 2021 ISB Virtual Microbiome Series.

Viral on YouTube

Before October 13, 2021, 522 videos had been posted to ISB’s YouTube channel since the channel’s inception in 2009. Those 522 videos had amassed 334,000 views total, which is an average of 640 views per video.

On October 13, 2021, we livestreamed day one of this series on YouTube. The main platform where registered attendees viewed the program was Zoom Webinar. However, I had decided to setup the YouTube livestream in case our audience had any issues connecting to Zoom.

A few days later, the views for this video began exponentially increasing. In nine days, the ISB channel views were up 872% due to this video. The daily channel views went from 340 to about 3,300. The video eclipsed 100,000 views within the first 18 days of posting, a milestone less than 1% of all content on YouTube ever reaches. At the time of this writing, there are now 139,000 views for this video:


Some highlights from YouTube analytics:

  • 29% of ISB’s lifetime views are from this video
  • 57% of ISB’s 2021 views are from this video
  • 8.7 million impressions: the number of times this video’s thumbnail has been shown to viewers on YouTube
  • People from 86 countries have viewed this video, with 51% of all views coming from within the US
  • 257 new subscribers from this single video
  • 32,900 hours of total watch time