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Virtual meetings promise to eliminate geographical and administrative barriers and increase accessibility, diversity and inclusivity

Nature Biotechnology volume 40, pages 133–137 (2022)Cite this article

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Conference organizers must adopt a novel, comprehensive approach to ensure increased accessibility, diversity and inclusivity of post-pandemic conferences.

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Fig. 1: Distribution of participants by gender and ethnicity for the four virtual-based conferences in 2020.
Fig. 2: Increase in attendance by members of under-represented minority groups in 2020 (virtual) compared to 2019 (in-person) for the RECOMB conference.
Fig. 3: Increased diversity and inclusion of participants in the RECOMB conference in virtual compared to in-person formats.
Fig. 4: Comparison of the number of participants and countries per continent in virtual and in-person formats of the RECOMB conference.

Data availability

All data required to produce the figures and analysis performed in this paper are freely available at https://github.com/HCC-data-sciences-pub/virtual-conference-analysis.

Code availability

All code required to produce the figures and analysis performed in this paper is freely available at https://github.com/HCC-data-sciences-pub/virtual-conference-analysis.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank M. Alekseyev for his assistance with data inquiry and D. Kovats of the ISCB for responding to our queries. S.M. and K.P. are supported by US National Science Foundation grants 2041984 and 2135954. R.B. acknowledges funding from the Hillman Fellows for Innovative Cancer Research Program.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Juncheng Wu, Anushka Rajesh, Yu-Ning Huang.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Allegheny College, Meadville, PA, USA

    Juncheng Wu

  2. Department of Pharmacology & Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Southern California School of Pharmacy, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Anushka Rajesh & Karishma Chhugani

  3. Department of Clinical Pharmacy, University of Southern California School of Pharmacy, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Yu-Ning Huang, Kerui Peng & Serghei Mangul

  4. UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Rajesh Acharya & Riyue Bao

  5. Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Ruth D. Johnson

  6. Faculty of Journalism and Communication Studies, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Andrada Fiscutean

  7. International Laboratory for Human Genome Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico

    Carla Daniela Robles-Espinoza

  8. Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    Francisco M. De La Vega

  9. Department of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Riyue Bao

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  1. Juncheng Wu
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Riyue Bao or Serghei Mangul.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Tables 1 and 2, and Figs. 1–5

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Wu, J., Rajesh, A., Huang, YN. et al. Virtual meetings promise to eliminate geographical and administrative barriers and increase accessibility, diversity and inclusivity. Nat Biotechnol 40, 133–137 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-01176-z

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