The Pacific Northwest (PNW) Regional Node had a virtual meeting on April 20th, 2024. The event included participants from four different institutions geographically spanning from southern Oregon to Southern British Columbia, in Canada!
The event had two parts: student presentations and professional development for faculty. We had five student presenters: Taylor Evans, Amrit Singh and Dongliang Liu from the University of the Fraser Valley presented their annotation of F-Element projects. They were mentored by Dr. James Bedard. Alyssa Gerard from Southern Oregon University gave a presentation related to the Pathways Project, but focused on synteny analysis across multiple species. She was mentored by Dr. Nick Stewart. Natalie Sinclair, from Lewis & Clark College, walked us through her Pathways Annotation Report Form in a lab meeting style presentation and got very useful feedback from the other attendees to complete her annotation. She was mentored by Dr. Norma Velazquez. After presentations ended, the student attendees left and the professional development part of the event started. We invited Chinmay Rele, from The University of Alabama, to talk to the PNW Node faculty about micropublications and reconciliation. We learned about the microPublication pipeline in the Pathways Project and about the new plans for publications. Lastly, the Node faculty members stayed a few more minutes to brainstorm ideas for future events. We all agreed that student presentations are very valuable for the Node.
What worked well for your event that might help others plan similar events?
It is always great to hear students present their work. We organized the presentations by research project and we talked about having each student focus on what made their project unique as an annotation. This made each presentation different despite multiple presentations on the same research project. The presentations were very flexible in format, to decrease the barrier for student participation. We even included one “lab meeting” style presentation to get feedback from the group. There were good questions from attendees and great camaraderie and support for each presentation.
What would your Node do differently based on your experiences?
Invite more students that are not presenting to also attend.
