On 19 & 20 November, VIB & LifeTime welcomed over 400 people for the very first virtual edition of ‘Emerging Technologies in Single Cell Research’. 24 speakers presented their novel technologies in plenary sessions focused on: Single Cell Epigenomics, Single Cell Multi-Omics, Single Cell Computational Biology, Single Cell Spatial Omics and New Single Cell Technologies to Study Disease.
The conference kicked-off with a talk of Amos Tanay (Weizmann Institute of Science, IL) on “Single cell epigenomics and embryonic commitment”. Miao-Ping Chien (Erasmus University Medical Center/ UFO Biosciences, NL) was one of the speakers in the Spatial Omics session and she discussed “Seeing is sequencing: linking phenotypes and genotypes of heterogeneous cancer cells by high-throughput, microscopy-based single cell selection and functionally annotated single cell sequencing”. And in the last session 'New Single Cell Technologies to Study Disease' Samantha Morris (Washington University in St. Louis, US) gave a talk on “New genomic technologies to measure and manipulate cell identity”.
“It was my first virtual conference and as a young scientist I found this very inspiring. Despite it was virtual, it was really nice to see speaker discussions during networking sessions" - Stéphanie Gachet, INSERM, FR
One of the main goals of the VIB Conference Series program is to offer a platform for scientific discussion, networking and collaboration. The virtual platform that was used included several features to facilitate interaction between speakers, attendees and exhibitors.
We are happy to see that VIB's first virtual conference was not only attended well but also received high evaluation rates.
“I love the Hopin platform; stable. Very well organized!" - Mojca Strazisar, VIB-UAntwerp Center for Molecular Neurology, BE
"Our first virtual VIB conference was a great success, thanks to the very lively participation of all attendees. Mind blowing talks by Amos Tanay, Fabian Theis and so many others, and the opportunity to talk to keynote speakers and PhD students. While initially hesitant, I really liked this virtual format with ample room for networking, maybe even in an easier fashion than at a traditional conference." - Yvan Saeys, VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research, member of the organizing committee
If you are working on Single Cell research, you might be interested in our next virtual conference as well; Revolutionizing Next Generation Sequencing. This 4th edition will focus on advances in single-cell sequencing, ranging from transcriptomics, genomics, proteomics to combined multi-omics analysis and a dedicated session on spatial sequencing.