We’ve spent the last couple of months planning, building, and putting together the Evergreen schedule for the scientific talks, posters, and other events. Here’s a preview of what’s to come!
Evergreen Science Schedule
First of all, here’s the full schedule: https://evergreen.phage.directory/schedule
For the Scientific portion, we have finalized the talk schedule, and have 83 scientific talks, spread across 8 sessions, over four days. We’ll cover categories like Phage Therapy, Phage Defense, Ecology and Informatics, and Molecular Phage Biology, and will hear from a a variety of speakers from around the world. Additionally, we’re encouraging all speakers to present their talk as posters for Q&A time and the opportunity for deeper discussions.
In total, we have 140 submitted abstracts, with a total of 656 coauthors. We’ll have informal poster room sessions across many days, with two formal Poster Session Mixers on Wednesday and Thursday.
We’re also striving to record all talks, and are encouraging speakers and presenters to upload Posters and “Flash Talks” of their talks so that everyone can view
For Workshops: For the 25th Evergreen Phage Meeting, we have five workshops lined up. On Sunday, we’ll be learning about Metagenomics with Evelien Adriaenssens from Quadram Institute, Sequence Analysis with Justin Clark from TAILOR, Genome Annotation with BV-BRC (formerly PATRIC) with Ramy Aziz and Rebecca Wattam, and finally a special round table for Phage Biobanking Guidelines and Standards with Tobi Nagel from Phages for Global Health and Fran Hodges from the UK KTN.
Salt in My Soul Screening Movie Screening & Panel
On Monday evening, we’ll be screening Salt in My Soul, a documentary about Mallory’s life with cystic fibrosis, and her race to get phages in time to treat her Burkholderia infection. We’ll screen this movie in downtown Olympia at the Capitol Theater, followed by a panel Diane Shader Smith (Mallory’s mother), Martha Clokie, Tom Patterson, and Steffanie Strathdee. After the movie, we’ll have an informal mixer at Nicole’s Bar.
Past, Present and Future of Betty Kutter’s Legacy
This year, we’re doing a special event to commemorate Evergreen Phage history and Betty Kutter’s legacy. We’ll hear stories from a panel of speakers from Betty’s past and present, including Martha Clokie, Bob Blasdel, Patrick Paddison, Steffanie Strathdee, Randy Fish, Ramy Aziz, Gina Suh, Steve Abedon.
We’ll also set up a gallery of photos and past work from Betty’s life in the hallway. Here are a few items we’ve found from the archive.
Evergreen Fun
TAILOR is doing a scavenger phage hunt in various locations around Evergreen. They’ll have a special machine for processing environmental samples (!). They’ll be setting up something creative and cool — we can’t wait to see it!
On Thursday, we’re celebrating Betty turning 84 with plenty of cake. Our t-shirts will also be arriving that day.
Our t-shirts are coming in next Thursday, and will be available for purchase!
On Friday, we’ll still be doing the customary hike to Mt. Rainier! We’ll have a spread of lunch available, a bus from the mountain straight to SeaTac airport, and tons of phage conversations.
Evergreen Online Availability
Since many couldn’t make it out to Olympia for various reasons, like visas not processing soon enough, or lack of funding, we’re striving to put as much of Evergreen online as possible.
We’re dealing with some AV staffing issues at Evergreen State, but we’re striving to record as many talks and workshops as we can. We’re also encouraging every speaker to upload their posters and a short Youtube video of their poster as well. Hopefully we’ll also make Youtube Live Streaming available!
And finally, we’ll make all the online resources, from abstracts to videos and posters free for anyone who registers an Evergreen account.
Sign up for an online account here: https://evergreen.phage.directory
Future Plans of Evergreen
It’s not clear what the future Evergreen Phage Meeting and Phagebiotics looks like yet, but this is most likely the last time Evergreen Phage Meeting is at Evergreen State College.
We’re still digging a up lot of resources from the past, and it would be great to create an online gallery for all the past videos and artifacts we’ve collected over the years, to commemorate the history of Evergreen Phage Meeting (and the history of phage research!).
If you have any ideas and suggestions, please email Ria (who leads the Phagebiotics board) at [email protected].
The future of Evergreen is uncertain, but bright!
