Gatherings in Biosemiotics 2023 in Copenhagen – deadline March 20

The 17th Gatherings in Biosemiotics take place in the University of Lausanne, Switzerland

GATHERINGS IN BIOSEMIOTICS, 2004

I was formally responsible for the organization of two Gatherings that took place in Prague, in 2004 and 2009. As far as I can remember, people were satisfied with the scientific content as well as the overall organization–so I will restrict myself but to some personal remarks that may illustrate the development of the Gatherings during those years. From my perspective, there was a radical difference between the two events.

The Gatherings in Biosemiotics is the first and only regular series of worldwide conferences in semiotic biology. Originally these annual meetings alternated between Copenhagen and Tartu, but broadened their scope early on to include other destinations. This year’s [2012] Gatherings in Biosemiotics again takes place in Tartu, and we have prepared a special edition of the Tartu Semiotics Library book series, Gatherings in Biosemiotics, to commemorate this, the tweltfh and largest of the Gatherings so far. This commemorative edition includes new material on the basics of biosemiotics, as well as a complete history of the Gatherings as told by their organizers.

The aim of this 2-day international symposium scheduled for 23-24 May 2017 is to assess the state of the emergent research field of meeting science (or meeting research) as evidenced by recent edited volumes and special issues (Allen et al. 2015; de l’Estoile 2015; Brown, Reed & Yarrow [forthcoming]; Clarke, Wodak & Kwon [forthcoming]; Sandler & Thedvall [forthcoming]) and to foster interdisciplinary dialogue through a multidisciplinary network of scholars with a shared interest in face-to-face meetings. It is the first attempt ever to bring together meeting researchers from all social sciences to create synergies and cross-fertilization between meetings related research that has so far taken place in relative isolation from each other in social anthropology, organizational communication, sociology, workplace studies, sociolinguistics, political science, psychology, management, and even applied IT (Group Support Systems).

Journal of Science Communication

The 2022 Ecsite conference took place in Heilbronn, Germany, from 2–4 June after two years of virtual meetings due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This review presents some highlights of this event, including two memorable keynote talks by disability activist Sinéad Burke and author/educator Lucy Hawking.

Biosemiotics, 2021

We review the organization and contents of the 20th Gatherings in Biosemiotics. As the organizers, we share our insights from organizing a community research project in the year where the Covid-19 pandemic halted international travel. We try to describe the challenges of putting together the yearly conference on Biosemiotics and the main content that was presented by the research community.

Conference proceedings, 2022

Gatherings in Biosemiotics

2020

VIBes in Biosciences is an international symposium which aims to bring together PhD students working in a broad variety of life sciences fields, such as immunology, cancer biology, neuroscience and microbiology. Not only the audience exclusively consisted of young researchers, but also the organizing committee members were mainly PhD students from the different centers and campuses of VIB. This edition was sold-out and was supposed to take place from 11 to 13 March 2020 in Leuven, hosting a series of training workshops and presentations from speakers from all over the globe, such as Nobel Prize Laureate Paul Nurse, György Buzsáki, Madeline Lancaster and Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Unfortunately, the meeting was shortened to two days and the program was adapted due to the COVID-19 measures that the Belgian government adopted with the conference in progress. Nevertheless, we managed to both set up a teleconference for speakers willing to share their work with an eager audience, and provide a live stream for the registered participants who could not physically attend the meeting. This way, many participants were still able to join this special edition of VIBes.

XXIII Gatherings in Biosemiotics, 2023

The abstract book of the 23rd annual Gatherings in Biosemiotics (University of Copenhagen, Denmark).

F1000Research

Since 2004, the ISCB Student Council has been organizing different symposia worldwide, gathering together the community of young computational biologists. Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic situation, the world scientific community was forced to cancel in-person meetings for almost two years, imposing the adoption of virtual formats instead. After the successful editions of our continental symposia in 2020 in the USA, Latin America, and Europe, we organized our flagship global event, the Student Council Symposium (SCS) 2021, trying to apply all previous lessons learned and to exploit the advantages that virtuality has to offer.