COVID-19 Ushers in the Future of Conferences

The pandemic has forced scientists everywhere to rethink in-person conferences, but some researchers have already been urging changes.

Written byAbby Olena, PhD

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The Society for Mathematical Biology and the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology had planned to hold a joint conference this August in Heidelberg, Germany. But by the time spring rolled around, and the pandemic took firm hold of global travel, that was looking less and less likely. On May 9, the organizers postponed the in-person meeting until 2021. Amber Smith, a mathematical biologist at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, and her fellow conference organizers stepped in to put together a virtual conference to give researchers a chance to share the research still advancing worldwide.

“We were really trying to have a meeting that was as close to an in-person meeting as we could possibly have,” Smith tells The Scientist. They found Sococo, a platform that allows users to create an online building. The organizers worked closely with virtual event coordinators at MathDept.org to ...

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Meet the Author

Abby Olena, PhD
As a freelancer for The Scientist, Abby reports on new developments in life science for the website. She has a PhD from Vanderbilt University and got her start in science journalism as the Chicago Tribune’s AAAS Mass Media Fellow in 2013. Following a stint as an intern for The Scientist, Abby was a postdoc in science communication at Duke University, where she developed and taught courses to help scientists share their research. In addition to her work as a science journalist, she leads science writing and communication workshops and co-produces a conversational podcast. She is based in Alabama.
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