Embedded Files
For organizers of symposia at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology SICB
This website is intended to help SICB symposium organizers develop a symposium proposal, plan their symposium, provide templates for communications with speakers, and resources for gaining external funding, and organizing additional events (such as workshops).
why organize a symposium?
why organize a symposium?
What previous symposium organizers say
What previous symposium organizers say
Sharlene E. Santana
Sharlene E. Santana
A Bigger Picture: Organismal Function at the Nexus of Development, Ecology, and Evolution (SICB 2016)
A Bigger Picture: Organismal Function at the Nexus of Development, Ecology, and Evolution (SICB 2016)
Organizing a SICB symposium gave me the opportunity to connect with colleagues and synthesize key challenges and opportunities to move forward in our field of study. The synergies we created led to new papers, grant proposals and research initiatives. The symposium also gave opportunities to junior researchers to share their work and ideas, thereby showcasing them as future leaders in the field.
Andrea Liebl
Andrea Liebl
Ecological Epigenetics (SICB 2013)
Ecological Epigenetics (SICB 2013)
It was really great to get a bunch of people together working towards the same goals. It’s still a new field (and even more so then!), so just having the time, space, and bandwidth for everyone to sit in the same room together and chat about things was HUGELY helpful.
Janneke Schwaner
Janneke Schwaner
An evolutionary tail: Evo-Devo, structure, and function of post-anal appendages (SICB 2021)
An evolutionary tail: Evo-Devo, structure, and function of post-anal appendages (SICB 2021)
Being an organizer gives a lot of opportunities. We got involved in a outreach project including two high schools and we organized a corresponding workshop which resulted in a forward-looking review article. And besides that it was the start of two collaborations directly involving me, I also know of at least 2 combinations of speakers that started collaborations after the symposium. Knowing that I created a platform for researchers to synergistically interact was huge. In the end, the many manuscripts in the special issue in ICB were the cherry on the cake.
Dan Speiser
Dan Speiser
2018 International Congress of Neuroethology
2018 International Congress of Neuroethology
I think organizing an event can be really helpful if you're trying to draw attention to a new sub-field. The symposium I co-organized was on distributed visual systems, a research area that had been growing for a while (within visual ecology and neuroethology) but didn't even have an agreed-upon name. I suspect the symposium helped pitch our research area to the program officers in attendance. It certainly helped build and maintain collegiality between colleagues, which is important when everyone around you can choose to either be a collaborator or competitor.
Program officer
Janet Steven
email: janet.steven@cnu.edu
Please contact the SICB program officer with questions about symposium organization
Resources
Resources
Below some useful links
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