Keypoint Newsletter: A Message from Our CEO

By Jamie Baumgartner, PhD, Keystone Symposia President & CEO

Having been in the CEO position at Keystone Symposia for nearly six months, I have learned a great deal about the intricacies of establishing high quality scientific meetings. I had thought, like many reading this, that scientific meetings were simply showing up, talking science, networking, then going home. Au contrair! Being privy to the operations of Keystone Symposia has opened my eyes to the very detailed planning process required to achieve the seamless conference experience for which Keystone is so highly regarded.

While I won’t get into the exacting details here, there are many reasons why Keystone Symposia meetings are among the best on the planet. First and foremost, the credit goes to our staff and Scientific Advisory Board. Our people are fantastic, dedicated and passionate about our mission to Accelerate Life Science Discovery. They strive every day to ensure that the scientific content of our meetings is state of the art, and that all attendees have a wonderful experience both personally and professionally.  

As I develop a deeper understanding of what makes Keystone Symposia so unique, I am also looking for opportunities for improvement. Along those lines, long time followers of Keystone Symposia will notice a few minor changes implemented this meeting season, and highlighted in this newsletter:

• We are integrating enhanced programming into each conference, to foster more career development and big picture conversations. These include forums on health equity, funding opportunities, publishing strategies, regulatory challenges, professional networking, and more.

• We are celebrating Scholarship, Early Career Investigator, Fellows and Global Health Travel Awards, which are awarded on merit for their scientific excellence. These outstanding scholars deserve to be recognized and are now being announced at our conferences, and provided with badge ribbons, to encourage attendees to congratulate them and inquire about their work. This will raise their visibility within the community and provide them with additional networking and collaborative opportunities.
  

• We are continuing our work to champion DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), and expanding those efforts. We strongly believe that creating an inclusive and safe environment at Keystone Symposia Conferences encourages discussion of diverse perspectives and research approaches that ultimately accelerate science with broader impacts. We are working to expand our DEI focus to better assist women scientists as well as to address needs and concerns of the LGBT community.
  

Although we are implementing positive changes at Keystone Symposia, scientific conference organizations like ours, face significant challenges with overall declining attendance at meetings since the COVID-19 pandemic. There are many reasons why researchers are attending fewer meetings, including lower funding rates, higher costs of travel, potential for on demand content and climate change impacts. We will work to address the issues that we can, starting by instituting a carbon offset program (beginning in January) and launching an enhanced virtual conference platform in 2025.

We will continue to explore ways we can strengthen and improve our organization and conferences, and encourage our community to reach out directly with suggestions on how we may improve and adapt to better serve our scientists-- email your ideas to info@keystonesymposia.org! Post-conference surveys are also of utmost importance for us, arming us with information from our conference attendees to guide further changes. Only by connecting with the community can we ensure that we continue to host the most impactful scientific conferences and best support our scientific communities.

I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and look forward to meeting many of you in the coming conference season.

Keystone Symposia President & CEO

Return to the December 2024 Keypoint Newsletter