Meeting record
Why eSMB 2020 happened online
The decision to move the annual meeting online was made under pressure, but it was not improvised. It drew on the society's structure, its subgroups, and a clear sense of what a scientific meeting is for.
A meeting that could not proceed as planned
The 2020 annual meeting was scheduled as a joint event with the European Society for Mathematical Biology in Heidelberg. As the pandemic disrupted travel and large gatherings, that plan was postponed. The society's board then chose a different path: a virtual meeting in the same week, organized around the existing subgroups and open to members worldwide.
The result was eSMB 2020, held from August 17 to 20. Sessions were placed inside a five hour window in the US Eastern time zone, from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm, to make participation possible across many countries. The compact window forced choices, but it also gave the week a shared rhythm.
What the virtual format changed
A room can hold only so many people. A network can hold more. The virtual format made it possible for presenters and attendees to join without travel, and it allowed the society to record parts of the program for later use. It also made the informal parts of a conference harder, which is why the organizers invested in spatial rooms, social blocks, and a mentoring program.
The program kept the formats that matter to the community: plenary lectures, minisymposia, contributed talks, and posters. Each subgroup was invited to assemble a minisymposium, a poster block, and a keynote suggestion. Independent submissions were also accepted, so the program was not limited to invited work.
The scientific case for gathering
The meeting took place while models of infectious disease were being used, questioned, and sometimes misread in public. For mathematical biologists, that visibility carried a responsibility. The program gave room to explain what models can do, how they are built, and why their predictions depend on assumptions and data.
That theme ran through the week without reducing the meeting to a single subject. The subgroups brought their own questions: how cells organize tissues, how immune responses scale, how populations evolve, how methods travel between fields, and how teaching can keep pace with computation.
How the program was assembled
The organizing committee worked with subgroup leads to build the scientific program. Plenary speakers were identified by the committee. Minisymposia and poster sessions were organized within the subgroups. Contributed talks filled the remaining slots. The schedule was published by day, with a separate mentoring program on the Sunday before the main meeting.
Registration was required for all participants, including those who were not presenting. The fee was waived before July 15, 2020, and set at 25 dollars afterward. Two optional contribution levels allowed registrants to support participation by early career researchers.
The meeting did not try to reproduce a physical conference room. It tried to preserve the parts of a conference that produce new questions: talks that are close enough to argue with, posters that invite a conversation, and time set aside for people at different stages of their careers.
Looking back
This archive records the program as it was published: the days, the sessions, the speakers, and the poster presenters. It writes new descriptive text for the rebuilt pages and does not reproduce the original conference copy, images, or media. Where the live record was incomplete, the archive says so rather than filling the gap with invented detail.
For readers who want to follow the week, the schedule is the best starting point. For readers who want to see the breadth of the community, the poster index is the fastest route.
Open the program · Browse the poster record · Read about registration