Progress 07/01/20 to 09/13/21
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience of this project included graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty, 47% of whom were from the US, that research and study plant biology and that participated in the 2021 International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR).This project allocated significant resources to US early-career scientists (students, postdoctoral scholars and junior faculty) that tend to lack financial resources to attend major conferences. The project enabled 23 early-career scientists, and 28 additional scientists, most of whom also presented talks, to participate in the conference by providing registration awards. Another key effort of this project was to enable the delivery of science-based knowledge via conference seminar presentations in ten specific areas: 'Translating Research Into Impact', 'Systems Approaches to Understanding and Engineering Plant Biology', 'Plant Hormones', 'Leveraging Natural Variation to Understand Immune Functions', 'Exploring Brassicaceae Diversity', 'Feeling Stressed? Environmental Adaptation in Extremophyte Relatives of Arabidopsis', 'Translational Regulation of Gene Expression', ' When Development Meets Stress- Integration of Plant Growth and Defense', 'Plasticity of Plant Development in Response to the Environment', and 'Quantitative Development in the Digital World' sessions. Changes/Problems:This project was originally submitted as ICAR 2020-Seattle and was planned to be held, in-person, at the University of Washington, Seattle in June 2020. The global Covid-19 pandemic that started in Spring of 2020 forced postponement of the conference to June 2021. The lack of a broadly-accessible and effective vaccine in time for the rescheduled in-person ICAR necessitated the conference to be moved to an online setting. While it was a significant challenge to postpone the fully-developed program just three months before it was scheduled to be held, the health and safety concerns, as well as travel restrictions, demanded it. The organizers did consider simply canceling the conference altogether but chose not to, due to the extensive community involvement in developing the program over the previous two years. Since more than 90% of the program was developed by the community, canceling the ICAR would affect hundreds of plant scientists that had spent significant time developing the most innovative ICAR program in history. The organizers decided that the additional effort and time to reorganize and plan a virtual ICAR was worth expending on behalf of the community. A positive outcome of the virtual format was that it was more accessible to more scientists, including those that lacked financial ability to travel to the US, lacked ability to obtain travel documents, or had family (or other) obligations, including new parents, that would preclude them from traveling to an in-person conference. There were a ~1000 participants, compared to the typical average attendance of ~700-800 in North America. ICAR 2021 participants came from nearly 250 institutions/companies and from 41 countries, a 50% increase over the average number of participating countries at North American. There were participants from new countries including Iran, Kazakhstan, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Estonia, and the Czech Republic, to name a few. Further, ICAR 2021-Virtual was the first ICAR for 61% of attendees (hopefully, the first of many.) The survey data gathered after the conference revealed that more than 3/4 of respondents thought that future ICARs, even when held in-person, should maintain some virtual components to enable broader access. A second positive outcome of the virtual format was that due to reduced participation costs and elimination of all travel costs, the original project budget allocated for 20 US participants could be stretched to enable full participation by 51 US participants. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project funded a total of 51 US participants (most of whom were conference speakers), including 27 invited speakers in program priority areas for the USDA. The original project budget was written to support 20 US participants; the necessity to move ICAR to a virtual setting reduced costs and enabled the project budget to cover 51 US participants. 25 of the 51 participants, including 2 postdoctoral scholar invited speakers, were at the pre-tenure faculty or earlier stage. The ICAR 2021 organizers (including the project's PI and co-PI) developed novel programming approaches to promote early-career scientists and community leadership; the result was the most diverse program in ICAR history. With 23 of the 300+ speakers invited by the organizers, the program prioritized community proposed/led sessions and speakers and devoted 92% of the program to community-proposed sessions which featured students, postdocs and junior (pre-tenure) faculty in 67% of the speaking slots. Gender parity was achieved in the 300+ platform speakers for invited speakers (52% women), community mini-symposium chairs (59% women) and community session speakers (52% women). The community response to our novel approaches was overwhelmingly positive. Novel approach #4, the survey's second highest rated approach, was our focus on career stage and gender balance and diveristy of speakers and session organizers. We included a separate selection process for proposals submitted by students and postdoctoral scholars to fill a pre-set minimum of 25% of chair slots. Ultimately, the 59 session chairs were comprised of 32% students or postdocs, 32% junior (pre-tenure) faculty, 31% post-tenure faculty, and 5% other; and 64% of session chairs identified as women. A minority of respondents did not appreciate, or agree with, the focus on diversity by gender or career stage; these comments could be summarized as "one should focus on the science and not any personal attribute." When the demographics of ICAR participants were compared to those given a platform to speak, we saw that there was equal representation by reported gender: Women: 51%:52% attendees: speakers; Men: 44%:44% attendees: speakers; Decline to state: 5%:3% attendees: speakers, Non-binary/gender queer: 1%:1% attendees: speakers. However, while there was greater representation by early career speakers than at a typical ICAR, early-career speakers remained under-represented compared to their attendance levels: Career stage: Students & Postdocs: 56%:40% attendees: speakers; Faculty: 36%:53% attendees: speakers, Other title: 7%:8% attendees: speakers. Example comments: "Very varied, and very often interesting to people from different backgrounds. It was nice to give the power to the community." "Great, I appreciate the effort that went into bringing in diverse speakers." "That's the way it should be [referring to gender parity]." "I like the fact that you focused on career stage, especially for young researchers and ECR, in order to increase their visibility and create the opportunity to extend their professional network."A demographic that showed imbalance is racial and ethnic diversity of conference attendees, which likely reflects the make-up of the plant science community at large. Attendees self-reported racial/ethnic status across nearly 40 categories; when grouped to 7 major categories this became: 49% (included White in some aspect); 32% (included Asian in some aspect); 9% (preferred not to answer), 6% (included Hispanic or Latinx in some aspect), 4% (included Black or African, in some aspect), 0.5% (wrote in multiple categories), 0.3% (wrote in a new, single category). There is clearly more effort and focus needed to enable equal participation and leadership in the plant sciences. Novel approach #5 was based on many years of community survey input that showed opportunities to present one's work is a top priority for ICAR. ICAR 2021 featured more than 300 speakers, a nearly 2.5-fold increase compared to the last US-based ICAR in 2017 that featured 122 speakers. Furthermore, ICAR 2021 provided significantly more leadership opportunities for the community: 92% of speakers were invited by the community in 2021 compared to 62% in 2017 were community. There was a trade-off of course, to having many more speakers, and that was the necessity to choose which talks to attend. One benefit of the virtual format was that the organizers had all talks recorded; the recordings were posted 1 week prior to the conference and were accessible to attendees for 6 weeks following. Example comments: "I enjoyed seeing a wide range of speakers, including graduate students and post-doctoral fellows." "It was a bit overwhelming, too many to choose from. Being able to watch for a month afterwards helps." "I liked hearing many things, and having a chance to follow up on the snippets by chats or by looking up papers (and sometimes rewatching)." Finally, novel approach #6 was added as the organizers brainstormed creative ways to maintain interactivity upon pivoting to a virtual setting. The intent was to enable greater community discussions by reserving 20-25 minutes of each mini-symposium for session chair-led discussion sessions. Survey respondents gave this approach a score of 3.11, indicating that the discussions were generally appreciated and scored as "worked well (3)". Virtual discussions were expected to be more difficult than when done in-person due to technical and time-zone challenges. Organizers also enabled additional 1-hour small group discussions for any session members that wanted to continue following the schedule session time. Comments included "This really depends on the chair of the session and whether they pay attention to who is getting asked questions to ensure each speaker gets a chance to talk." "I wish the group discussion was more interactive, rather than just reading and answering questions from the chat. The "room" discussion after the session was quite useful and some lasted one hour!" "I like standard Q&A much more. Questions for a speaker are much more fresh right after a talk. Also several speakers received no questions but would have if they had their own question period." "When this worked well, it was great. I loved hearing the speakers talk with one another and 'riff' off each other's thoughts." "The virtual discussions were really well done in this setting. In a live venue I do prefer having questions after each talk." In addition, this project supported several speakers and organizers of sessions focused on training and professional development in concurrent sessions and workshops. These sessions included "Running a Research Group in the Next Generation', ' Exploring Acting in Allyship', 'Our Lab': Building a Community', and ' Active Learning and CUREs in Undergraduate Plant Science Education'. All sessions were open to all conference attendees, including those funded by this project. These sessions included interactive components, some had small breakout discussion groups. These opportunities for personal and professional development were overwhelmingly valued by those that attended, the majority of whom were early career (students, postdocs, and junior faculty.) How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?The conference program has been posted on the community website hosted by the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC). Several of the conference's workshop sessions were recorded and posted publicly to YouTube for broader engagement. ICAR organizers shared speaker and session leader demographic data on the publicly-available NAASC website, hosted by MASC. The organizers will make the summary results of the ICAR 2021 survey available at that website as well and send the summary by email to all conference participants. They have already provided an advanced summary to the organizers of the next two ICARs (UK and Japan), so the community input can be considered at the earliest stage. The organizers and participants of ICAR 2021 also used Twitter to share information out from the conference. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The increasing demands of a growing, prosperous world for improved agricultural products including food, fuel and fiber intensify the need for a thorough understanding of the basic biology and ecology of plants. Challenges such as the need to feed an increasing population from less land acreage, the need to respond quickly to climate change, and the need for renewable and carbon-neutral fuels, will be met through a revamped and expanded focus on basic plant biology and its contributions to applied research and ecological stewardship. Such efforts require a deep understanding of plant growth and development, including those under varied environmental conditions and ecosystems. A vital mission of plant biologists is to engage in research, education and outreach that will generate valuable knowledge of economically important crop species, enable progress towards the goals of sustainable agriculture and food production, contribute to mitigating climate instability, and preserve Earth's natural resources for future generations. Research and education using the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, has transformed the field of plant biology. The project focused on two connected approaches to achieve our objectives of supporting the development of early career scientists and to facilitate high-level scientific conversations and information sharing of the latest research to translate basic plant biology discoveries to crops of agricultural importance. This was achieved by supporting 51 US scientists at various career stages to take part in the annual international plant biology conference that focuses on Arabidopsis thaliana, the International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR). The project facilitated changes in knowledge which we believe will underpin changes in action in future plant biology research approaches and collaborations. First, the project enabled the participation in ICAR 2021-Virtual of 8 highly acclaimed US plant biologists to present their cutting-edge research in invited platform talks; second, it enabled the participation in ICAR 2021 of 31 mid-career, and 12 early-career, US plant biologists to give concurrent session presentations in these (and other) sessions, thereby contributing to our primary goal to advance US science. The specific sessions this project supported were 'Translating Research Into Impact', 'Systems Approaches to Understanding and Engineering Plant Biology', 'Plant Hormones', 'Leveraging Natural Variation to Understand Immune Functions', 'Exploring Brassicaceae Diversity', 'Feeling Stressed? Environmental Adaptation in Extremophyte Relatives of Arabidopsis', 'Translational Regulation of Gene Expression', ' When Development Meets Stress- Integration of Plant Growth and Defense', 'Plasticity of Plant Development in Response to the Environment', and 'Quantitative Development in the Digital World'. In total, more than 300 talks were featured at ICAR 2021 on a broad range of scientific topics. We measured the impact of our project through the use of an online survey that first asked participants to assess how the first virtual ICAR fit their needs; 379 participants responded at least partially. Of 271 respondents that had an opinion, more than 85% indicated they preferred that virtual components be part of future ICARs even when they are 'in-person'. While many noted a preference for in-person conferences, many commented that a hybrid event increases accessibility. It is clear that virtual components are valued. ICAR 2021 was the first virtual ICAR and is a test-case for the global plant biology community. Additional survey questions addressed the impact of the novel and innovative programmatic approaches taken by meeting organizers (including this project's PI and co-PI). The survey's main objective is to improve ICAR to better meet community needs; we will share a summary with the community and have already shared preliminary results with ICAR 2022 organizers. We asked respondents to rate, on a scale of 1 (did not like) to 4 (outstanding/excellent) the novel approaches at ICAR 2021. Given that the meeting was postponed and converted to a virtual setting, with all the accompanying challenges of a new, untested environment, we were happy to see that the mean scores ranged from 3.11-3.40, and that 70-88% of respondents rated all approaches as "worked well (3)" or "outstanding/excellent (4)". The novel approaches at ICAR 2021, with accompanying mean survey scores were: (1) inclusion of 36 community-proposed and led mini-symposia (score: 3.40), (2) selecting invited plenary and keynote speakers, including through community nomination, that hadn't recently been featured (score: 3.35), (3) developing new plenary session topics around bigger mechanistic themes; a balance of fundamental discoveries with work that showcases applied research; and a focus on the broad set of tools of high utility available for Arabidopsis that enable translation to important crop species (score: 3.23), (4) diversifying speakers in sessions and engaging non-traditional speakers including the prioritization of balanced demographics in speakers (gender and career stage, score: 3.37), (5) dramatically increasing the number of opportunities for participants to present their work (score: 3.29), and (6) discussion sessions during concurrent symposia (score: 3.11). Novel approaches #1-3 address key project goals and are expanded upon here, while #4-#6 are addressed in the next section of the report. The top rated new approach was inclusion of community-proposed and led mini-symposia. Organizers held a community competition and received nearly 100 applications for 36 slots; the solicitation encouranged diverse applications by gender, career stage, institution, and geographic location. The variety of proposals was extensive and resulted in the most diverse program in ICAR history, with respect to topics and speaker demographics (gender, career stage). Example comments on community sessions: "The topics were exciting and diverse. Sometimes the sessions are a bit samey-samey from year to year, so it was a joy to hear about totally new systems, approaches, and topics." "Liked the breadth of topics covered and provided a good opportunity for people to speak." "This was the most amazing thing. It made the conference a real community initiative." This new approach was so widely-liked and successful that the organizers for ICAR 2022 have adopted it in their programming. Novel approach #2 involved a variety of new ways to select the 23 invited speakers to ensure that new voices and science topics were featured; organizers decided to exclude from consideration any plenary or keynote speakers that had been featured at ICAR or ASPB annual meetings over the previous 5 years. Speaker ideas were gathered via community surveys, input from an external advisory board, looking at the DiversifyPlantSci online database, and by surveying recent plant biology publications. This approach was rated 3.35 out of a possible 4 on the community survey. Novel approach #3 might have been a bit more subtle to attendees; first, we developed a speaker list of those we would like to have speak, regardless of topic, and once confirmed, we grouped them into sessions. Our rationale for this approach was multifold: it puts emphasis on finding speakers that the audience is really excited to hear, because they have a new breakthrough to present. Sometimes these breakthroughs are so new, they will not fit into a preconceived "theme". It enabled us to address our diversity, equity and inclusion objectives, because we could manage this up front at a global level. We could devise creative and integrated session themes that will be more of a draw, rather than a narrower focus. The result was a novel and exciting program.
Publications
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