As the COVID-19 pandemic wound on, and global vaccination efforts improved, many annual traditions found themselves adapting to the pandemic-induced, “remote-format” life. Translational Medicine Day, hosted by UCSD BMES, found a unique kind of success in learning from last year’s efforts.

Translational Medicine Day (TMD) is a conference-style event organized by BMES, dedicated to bringing together students, industry professionals, and researchers interested in transforming research advances into patient-end medicine. Last year, TMD was abruptly interrupted by the onset of the pandemic. The event date was just two days after the entire state of California entered official lockdown. The responsible committee had to pivot in only about 48 hours to generate a hybrid in-person/online format in compliance with social distancing and capacity limits.

This hybrid format ended up creating some fairly-disruptive technical issues that we were able to learn from. For example, one of our streaming laptops ran out of power mid-stream. Our Industry Demonstration segment also saw serious limitations, being streamed from phone cameras. While we had successfully adapted to the onset of the pandemic, we performed serious concessions for the event to happen. As one of the co-chairs for that year’s committee, I felt that we had failed our audience in some respects.

So how does this former co-chair feel about TMD 2021? Much better, in fact! The event transitioned into an entirely online format that allowed the organizing committee to better focus their efforts and avoid the technical issues of the previous year. Overall, the event shifted themes to emphasize a commonly-overlooked element: community interactions and diversity in bioengineering.

A strong opening keynote presentation by Dr. Jesse Nodora emphasized the need for engineers and clinicians to interact directly with community representatives in order to better address problems on a community level. It was a paradigm shift that has gone unspoken in the bioengineering community. Engineers design for the particular needs of their clients, and, as bioengineers, our clients are the communities that medicine/med-tech directly impacts. Very often, the needs and resources of impoverished communities make advanced med-tech and medicine difficult deliverables; meanwhile, local culture and stigmas around medicine can challenge the potential of new med-tech to make an impact. Thus, the typical “bench to bedside” approach of translational medicine benefits when the model is shifted to “bench to bedside to community.”

The speaker sessions saw a focus on bioinformatics and modeling, ensuite with the new online format. Dr. Hannah Carter and Dr. Debashis Sahoo gave excellent in-depth presentations on genomics-based tumor treatment, and statistical modeling of cancer growth, respectively. Dr. Andrew McCulloch spoke on the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of the UCSD bioengineering community, holding up the committee’s new mission to support diversity in engineering. I feel that the committee tried their best to find speakers who support their vision of TMD and of translational medicine as a whole.

This year I saw an even stronger demonstration of the TMD committee’s overall vision for the event during the Ethics Panel. Focusing on the ethics of precision medicine and genomics, the panel was downsized to only three panelists (compared to the four of previous years). However, the downsizing helped each panelist’s perspective stand out much more. For example, Dr. Sandra Lee spoke on the need to improve community trust and awareness in genomics — which came from her experience in an organizational role. Meanwhile, Dr. Shumei Kato emphasized clinicians as “knowledge fountains” for patients and the front-line for education on precision medicine — ideas he drew from his personal experience directly interacting with patients. Both perspectives were well-emphasized and played into the themes of community and diversity iterated throughout the event.

As a former co-chair of the TMD committee, I found it very enriching to experience TMD once again as an attendee (while armed with the perspective and memories of what it was like to organize such a large-scale event). The committee’s emphasis on vision shone through with more focused themes and presentation topics, all guided by the 2021 co-chairs Rachel Lian and Karthik Raj. With a break from 2020’s hectic organizational pace, TMD 2021 has been a good improvement. I believe there will be little limit for the heights TMD can aspire for in the future.