From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 4, October 2020.
The Botany 2020 meeting was held virtually on July 27-31 this year, as an alternative to the on-site meeting originally planned to be held in Anchorage, Alaska. The virtual meeting was a great success considering the circumstances of the pandemic. The virtual platform and the low registration fees ($100 per person to pay for IT support to manage all the video talks) enabled many international colleagues to participate in the conference, most of whom may not have been able to attend the meeting if it was held on-site. Many international researchers, especially students, were able to attend the meeting and interact with colleagues in a conference setting for the first time.
Botany 2020 was attended by 1,323 botanists, substantially higher than the typical attendance for a Botany meeting. The conference attendees hailed from over 45 countries and all 50 U.S. states; there were 439 contributed papers and 202 posters presented, as well as 14 workshops, 7 special lectures, 5 symposia, and 10 colloquia. Many attendees praised the thorough organization and seamless execution of the meeting, and an article published in Science Magazine on virtual scientific meetings highlighted the Botany meeting as a success story.
Several colleagues in Smithsonian Botany presented their research at Botany 2020. These include virtual talks by Bort Edwards, Richard Hodel, and Jun Wen, a virtual class on botanical drawing by Alice Tangerini, and posters by visiting graduate student Chun Su and visiting scientist Lei Duan. Several curators (Eric Schuettpelz, Warren Wagner, Ken Wurdack, and Liz Zimmer) participated in the meetings. The pre-recorded virtual format of the talks enabled the speakers to interact with colleagues and answer questions via chat during the entire talk. The recorded talks are available to attendees for a year after the conference, enabling attendees to catch up on talks they missed due to conflicts in concurrent sessions, or re-watch talks relevant for their own research.
Jun Wen also moderated the Cooley Award session with 10 talks, sponsored by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT). In the Cooley Award session, graduate students and early-career researchers and postdocs received lots of encouraging feedback from peers and senior scientists. It was a collegial and supportive session with many excellent talks presented by the young generation of systematists.
At the ASPT Awards Zoom session, visiting graduate student Chun Su was awarded one of the named Graduate Student Research Grants--the Shirley and Alan Graham Grant--in the amount of $1500.00.
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