I presented at my first virtual conference; the Institute for Health in the Built Environment Build Health 2020 industry consortium meeting on May 14, 2020.
Comprised of the Biology and the Built Environment Center, the Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory, and Baker Lighting Lab, IHBE connects researchers, practitioners, and designers engaged in creating healthier buildings. For the past few years they have hosted a mini-conference in Portland, Oregon in May, but this year a virtual format was a safer choice.
IHBE meeting organizers did a fantastic job at facilitating a remote meeting with a dozen speakers across multiple time zones. This included creating formatted slide decks for speakers to populate, coordinating sections by colors and symbols and providing respective virtual backgrounds for section speakers to use, and use of breakout rooms for smaller discussion groups.
I presented “Framing the discussion of microorganisms as a facet of social equity in human health“, and you can find a recorded version of the presentation here. There are no closed captions, but you can read the audio as annotations here:
The concept of “microbes and social equity” is one I’ve been playing with for a little over a year, and has developed into a colloquium course at the University of Oregon in 2019, an essay in PLoS Biology in 2019, and a consortium of researchers participating in “microbes and social equity part 2”. The Part 2 group has been developing some exciting research events planned for later in 2020, and those details will be forthcoming!
