Meetings In the Time of Coronavirus: Conferences go Viral June-July usually marks peak conference season when the GigaScience team is on the road, but with the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down travel and public gatherings it has been a strangely static summer.

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC was the venue for this year’s ASCB|EMBO 2019 Meeting that took place on 7-11 December 2019. The American Society of Cell Biology conference, now merged with the EMBO meeting, is the largest yearly gathering for the cell imaging community, and GigaScience has attended in the past.

EMBL Heidelberg was the venue for the EMBL Symposium: Seeing is Believing – Imaging the Molecular Processes of Life that took place on 9-12 October 2019. This was the second EMBL meeting on imaging data we attending this year after VIZBI (see the write-up here), GigaScience Data Scientist Chris Armit was there and was astonished at how recent breakthroughs in imaging technology are enlightening our understanding of the Life Sciences.

In Sultry Switzerland, Bioinformatics is Radiant at ISMBECCB Water cooling of our datacenter (& friends) Regular readers will know GigaScience originally launched at the 2012 ISMB (Intelligent Systems of Molecular Biology) meeting in Long Beach, and every subsequent year the conference has held a special place in our hearts as the place where we celebrate our birthday (see all the previous write-ups in GigaBlog).

Pressing Challenges for the Global Research Community Continuous growth of the world population is expected to double the worldwide demand for food by 2050. Eighty-eight percent of countries currently face a serious burden of malnutrition, especially in Africa and South-East Asia.