Our 2023 Annual Meeting in San Diego gathered over 4,500 biophysicists, about the same size as the pre-pandemic meeting in the same city three years earlier. Highlights included the President’s Symposium on Black in Biophysics, which will continue next year, and the BPS Lecture by Ardem Patapoutian, a Lebanese immigrant who shared the 2021 Nobel prize for his discoveries concerning our tactile sensing, a quintessentially biophysical process. The next Annual Meeting in Philadelphia will feature Carolyn Bertozzi, a 2022 Nobel laureate, as the 2024 BPS Lecturer. Extending an invitation for the BPS Lecture is a privilege of a BPS President and so is naming the Program Chairs who select the topics for the symposia and workshops and invited speakers therein. Our next Program Chairs, one based in the United States (Elizabeth Villa, University of California, San Diego) and the other in Europe (Ibrahim Cissé, Max-Planck Institute of Immunobiology & Epigenetics), have put together an exciting and forward-looking program for the 2024 BPS meeting in collaboration with the Program Committee. In this column, I wanted to explain how the Society decides who gets to present at BPS Annual Meetings and to announce three changes we are making to increase the number of presentation opportunities for our members.
Believe it or not, the Program Committee starts its work 18 months in advance. They propose a lineup of invited speakers grouped into symposia (more than 20 of them, focusing on biological systems) and workshops (approximately 4 of them, focusing on technologies), many based on member suggestions provided through an online portal. The BPS Council then provides feedback and approves a suitably revised program one year before the actual meeting. A parallel process organizes the Subgroup Saturday symposia, where Subgroup chairs invite their own speakers, typically seven to eight months before the meeting. To ascertain broad representation, we have a two-year rule for symposia, workshops, and Subgroup symposia: an invited speaker in one of the previous two meetings cannot be invited.
How about platform presentations (15 minutes per speaker) and poster presentations? Shortly after the early October abstract submission deadline, Council members and other Society leaders receive the abstracts relevant to their expertise and choose the platform speakers: eight speakers per two-hour session. We need to assign two co-chairs per session, so if you indicate your willingness to chair a session, you will have a greater chance of being selected! Posters are grouped according to the subject category chosen by the member. Finally, late abstracts submitted by early January are presented as posters, distributed equally over four days of the meeting.
So, what are we doing differently this time? Here are the three changes that will be implemented for the next BPS meeting, all designed to increase member participation.
1. Symposium speakers invited from abstracts: We will choose more than 20 invited symposium speakers from the abstracts, adding a fifth speaker to each symposium. Regular members and Early Career members (but not students or postdocs) will have the option of choosing “Symp Select” during abstract submission. Each speaker will have less time than before—invited speakers will have 25 minutes each and the speaker selected from the abstracts will have 20 minutes. But as we learned through the splendid lectures in the Black in Biophysics symposium, where introductory remarks by Bil Clemens and closing remarks by Theanne Griffith meant that each talk had to be 25 minutes long instead of the traditional 30 minutes, our members perform better under time constraints. If your abstract is not chosen for a Symposium talk, it will be automatically considered for a platform presentation. Oh, and your abstract does not have to be related to any specific symposium topic. We just want to hear a good story from you!
2. You can do both a talk and a poster: Previously, you could present your work in only one format, a platform talk or a poster. Some prefer the poster format, as it allows in-depth discussion with colleagues for an extended period, and those abstracts were not considered for a platform presentation. Now, you will be able to indicate your preference to also present a poster even when your abstract is chosen for a talk. We believe this change will improve the scientific content for both platform and poster sessions.
3. Five-minute flash talks: We will replace one of the eight talks in a platform session with three flash talks by students or postdocs, each five minutes long. We were inspired by Subgroup symposia, which experimented with flash talks and convinced us that a couple of major messages can be well delivered “in a flash,” albeit more declaration than explanation. These flash talks will be scheduled in the final slot so that interested audience members will have the opportunity to meet the speakers and ask questions afterwards. We will require flash talk speakers to also present their work in the poster format.
We are excited about these changes to our meeting program which we believe will significantly increase the number of presentation opportunities for you and improve the overall scientific content. Please feel free to reach out to me by email with any questions, suggestions, or concerns ([email protected]).
—Taekjip Ha, President