Open to everyone and easy to participate! No Zoom, no live video. Just you, your social media account, your creativity, and presentation at your pace and your terms.
You can see most of the presentations in one place even without having social media profiles.
Some of the video presentations can be watched on the ISEP YouTube channel.
Prizes:
The ISOP Prize for Best Online Student Presentation is awarded to: Victoria Accattatis.
The ISEP Prize for Creativity in Online Presentation is awarded to: Sarah Hu.
Shortlists:
Certificates of participation:
Instructions to Participants
Upload and post your presentation on Facebook (group ProtistSession) and/or Twitter. Be sure to use the hashtag #ProtistSession on both platforms.
Post it around the beginning of your time slot and then stay online and ready for discussions for the entire time of the 4-hour time slot. Of course, you do not need to stare into your phone/computer for the entire time. Just check it regularly enough so you will be able to engage in conversations with other participants and visitors.
If you are presenting more than once, make a new post for each time slot.
In order to be eligible for society-sponsored prizes, state your career stage (student, postdoc, professor, etc.) and your relationship to the presented work within or with your presentation. Leave your presentation online for at least 1 week after the poster session ends.
Enjoy and engage with presentations of others. You will have an opportunity to nominate up to 10 presentations in 2 categories for society-sponsored prizes, so think about that and make notes of your favorites. The email with a link to a nomination form will be sent at the end of the week, after all of the presentations have taken place.
If, for whatever reason, you would prefer not to post your presentation from your personal profile on either of the platforms, do not hesitate to contact us and we will figure out some individual solution together.
Feed of the presentations will be also visible through a new website so that people who have account on neither of the social platforms can passively participate. If you, for whatever reason, do not want your post to be accessible this way, please let us know and we will accommodate your wish.
This event is supported by the International Society for Evolutionary Protistology (ISEP) and the International Society of Protistologists (ISOP). There will be society-sponsored prizes with financial rewards, recognizing quality of the presented work as well as creativity with which you use the online environment:
ISOP Prize for Best Online Student Presentation
300 USD provided by ISOP awarded to a single participant or divided between 2 or 3 participants + a 1-year long membership in ISOP for each awardee.
Student participants are eligible (including PhD students and PhDs within 1 year of their degree).
Recognizes overall quality of the presentation including quality of the presented original research.
Awarded presentations will be placed on the ISOP website.
ISEP Prize for Creativity in Online Presentation
200 USD provided by ISEP awarded to a single participant or divided between 2 participants + a 2-year long membership in ISEP for each awardee.
All participants are eligible.
Recognizes quality and originality of the form of the presentation including its accessibility to people with disabilities and the creativity with which it uses the online environment.
Awarded presentations will be placed on the ISEP website.
1st round of the selection process consists of a poll among all registered participants (including non-presenting ones) and organizers in which each person can nominate up to 10 presenting participants for each of the 2 categories. 10 participants with the most votes for each of the 2 categories advance to the 2nd round, which consists of a discussion and vote among the 5 organizers (plus eventually officers representing the societies, if interested). Number of votes from the 1st round will be taken into account.
There will be 2 time slots per day:
East: 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM GMT (afternoon in East Asia/Oceania, morning in Europe/Africa)
West: 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM GMT (afternoon in Europe/Africa, morning in the Americas)
There will be 2 “venues”:
Twitter (hashtag #ProtistSession)
Facebook (group ProtistSession)
The particular session of your presentation will be defined by a combination of time slot and venue, eg.: 12EF05 means “presentation number 5 on August 12, time slot: East, venue: Facebook”. You can present either once, or twice in different sessions.
Important dates:
June 17: event announcement
July 8: registration opening
July 20: ISOP and ISEP support announcement
July 26: end of registration
July 28: last minute registration opening
August 2: preliminary program time table announcement
August 9: final program announcement
August 10, 1 – 5 PM GMT: sessions 10WF, 10WT
August 11, 6 – 10 AM GMT: sessions 11EF, 11ET
August 11, 1 – 5 PM GMT: sessions 11WF, 11WT
August 12, 6 – 10 AM GMT: sessions 12EF, 12ET
August 12, 1 – 5 PM GMT: sessions 12WF, 12WT
August 13, 6 – 10 AM GMT: sessions 13EF, 13ET
August 13, 1 – 5 PM GMT: sessions 13WF, 13WT
August 14, 1 – 5 PM GMT: sessions 14WF, 14WT
August 14, 5 PM GMT: opening of nomination
August 16: end of nomination
September 1: winners of prizes announced
How does it work?
Create your presentation in advance. Post it on Twitter and/or Facebook during a time slot of your choice together with other protistologists. Stay online for discussions in comments under your post during the 4 hours of your session. Enjoy and discuss your colleagues’ presentations.
Tell us about your research in any format convenient for you. Create a classic poster or slide show, write a blog post, record audio or video… Be creative! Let’s explore the possibilities together and inspire the future of protistology.
Why?
This year’s cancellation of conferences has inspired creation of multiple great online events (ISEP seminars and Protist.Online) which bring our protistological community together for talks and discussions via live video. These are immensely successful in recreating a great part of the scientific and social value of physical conferences. However, there are necesserily some limitations, especially concerning limited number of possible presenters, time zone-related issues, and also… not everybody is comfortable with talking live on video.
We would like to offer a complementary experience which, similarly to poster sessions during a physical conference, gives space to a greater number of active participants and encourages more detailed, personal discussions, through existing environment of social media, which many of us already use and are familiar with. This is not a new idea. Other scientific communities have already succasfully organized such online poster sessions. Look eg. here or here.
What to present?
Tell us about your research just like at a physical conference! Please note, however, that this is a public event, and so it wouldn’t be wise to share unpublished data or other confidential material. You can also use this opportunity to discuss other topics. Present a hypothesis, show us your protist-related art, introduce your favourite taxon, or a new promissing method. Take this as a low-stakes, friendly, inclusive, and informal environment, where you can experiment with both form and content of your presentation. Let’s get creative and have fun!
The format of your “online poster” is completely free and up to you! Here are some tips on how to make it more accessible:
use machine-readable text format where possible (avoid text exported to image, uneccessary tables, capitalized text or unusual fonts)
If presenting text in image format, you may include a link to a pdf file of the same material where the text is machine-readable.
include descriptions to figures and graphs (It is possible to enable alternate description for images on Twitter with 1000 character limit, here is a page on how to do it)
provide subtitles or transcript for your video and audio recording
avoid color schemes that may be difficult to read with some degree of color-blindness (this is one of the tools to check this)
avoid flashing or flickering content as these might trigger seizures in susceptible people
avoid raw URLs because text-to-speech programs will read it out, no matter how long
capitalize the first letter of each word in multi-word hashtags or other links like this: #ProtistSession (friendlier for screen readers, as well as for people with dyslexia or cognitive disabilities)
Organizers:
Anna Novak Vanclova (École Normale Supérieure, France, EU)
Johana Rotterova (Charles University, Czechia, EU)
Lukas Novak (Université Paris-Saclay, France, EU)
Shelby Williams (Dalhousie University, NS, Canada)
Shweta Pipaliya (University of Alberta, AB, Canada)