We are delighted that more and more SEA schools are coming together to host regional SEA symposia. These meetings offer many benefits, including more opportunities for students and faculty to network, collaborate, and present their research. In 2017-2018, at least one fifth of SEA schools participated in a regional symposium.
Attending a Regional Symposium
This academic year, there are already 6 regional symposia that are being planned. These meetings will be posted at https://seaphages.org/meetings/. If you are interested in attending one of these meetings with your students, please contact the hosting faculty members. Space can be a limiting factor for some venues.
Hosting a Regional Symposium
If you would like to host a regional symposium in the 2018-2019 academic year, HHMI is able to provide up to $1,000 of support for the meeting. We recommend that you begin by contacting SEA faculty from institutions close to you to begin planning a meeting. Remember, especially for our colleagues out West, a regional meeting can be as small as 2 SEA institutions coming together. A map of all SEA schools is available here, and a list of SEA institutions is available at our program website: https://seaphages.org/institutions/. As you begin planning, please contact us (Vic Sivanathan & Billy Biederman) at sea@hhmi.org for additional information about the financial support. When possible, the SEA Team would be delighted to join your meeting. A list of recommendations for hosting a regional symposia is below, compiled from the experiences of SEA faculty.
Below is a list of considerations and recommendations as you plan for your regional symposium.
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Participants: Identify SEA faculty from nearby SEA institutions that may be interested in hosting and/or participating in a regional symposium. A list of SEA institutions, sortable by location, is available at www.seaphages.org/institutions. The hosting institution should determine the number of participants that can be accommodated for the meeting, reserving appropriate space for talks, posters, meals, and other planned activities.
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Date and Time: Begin planning early. Set a date for the meeting, taking into consideration when students will have gathered sufficient data to present or to work on collaboratively, as well as end of year events, including final exams, the Annual SEA Symposium, and the summer break. Start and end times for the symposium should accommodate travel time to and from the meeting.
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Agenda: Past regional meetings have included a keynote presentation by an invited speaker, talks by SEA faculty, talks and posters by individual and/or teams of students, poster sessions, and activities such as a Genome Annotation Hackathon. Poster sessions and breaks are great opportunities for students to interact and network.
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Collaboration: Early symposium planning provides opportunities for regional schools to collaborate. For examples, participating schools may choose to work of different Actinobacterial hosts followed by a collaborative host-range project, or working collaboratively on a common Actinobacterial host and varying isolation strategies.
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Costs: Meeting costs include travel expenses, poster printing, meals, and keynote honorarium.