LEARNING TO LOVE VIRTUAL CONFERENCES

ABSTRACT

Lynn Cominsky, an astrophysicist at Sonoma State University in California, had planned to spend part of late March and early April in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the Ninth Fermi International Symposium, an event that would have gathered hundreds of astronomers and astrophysicists with an interest in Y-ray surveys conducted by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. Online meetings might lack many of the benefits of an in-person conference conversations over dinner;face-to-face networking;fresh perspectives that can come from simply leaving one's home ground. Prompted by Nature s coverage of the virtual conference of the American Physical Society (APS) in April, researchers shared their personal, and generally positive, experiences of online conferences in a Nature online poll.