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.