In case you haven’t heard, the 24th Biennial Evergreen Phage Meeting is happening in Olympia, Washington, USA, Aug 2-5 (with workshops on Aug 1 & 6). This year, there will be an option to attend either online or in-person!
Oh, and abstracts are due TODAY! (But you can still register for a couple more weeks!)
Register for Evergreen here: Register for Evergreen
Submit an abstract here: Submit abstract
Phage friends from all over: you’re invited!
The iconic Evergreen phage meeting is best described by the founder herself, Betty Kutter (who has hosted this meeting every other year since its beginning almost 50 years ago!). So here’s a letter from Betty to all of you, explaining the conference, how it will work, and why you should seriously consider joining us this August!
Dear phage friends,
Despite all the special challenges this year, we have at last worked out a way to put on the scheduled 24th Biennial Evergreen Phage Meeting on August 2nd - 5th 2021, with hands-on workshop(s) on Sunday the 1st and Friday the 6th. We invite all phage people to consider submitting abstracts and making plans to participate either in person or virtually. As always, we look forward to hearing about all the exciting phage work going on worldwide!
This time we will offer a hybrid event, where participants can actively engage either in person or in virtual environments. The meeting will include primary sessions with 20-min talks, live and virtual poster sessions with daily brief flash talks, breakout rooms, and Q&As for all participants. Virtual attendees will be invited to view the primary talks in a live format, with the ability to submit questions, and most talks will also be available as recordings to be viewed at your leisure.
We are working to make this event as safe as possible for everyone attending in person. Thus, we will be following all public health guidelines and are requiring all attendees to provide evidence of vaccination prior to the event. We will be glad to supply masks, and to ensure the safety of all attendees the meeting is capped at 25% of the venue capacity.
Please submit draft abstracts by July 2nd to be considered for oral presentations. Given the hybrid nature of this event, we will need a recorded video version of your talk, whether or not you are coming in person. This may be submitted until July 16th. Poster presentations will also take place both virtually and in-person; please submit the poster file in pdf format to facilitate printing on-site. We are also asking for a recording of a short video talk (~3 to 5 minutes) to accompany each of your posters, whether you are attending virtually or in-person.
The Evergreen campus is largely closed for the summer, so we have chosen Hotel RL Olympia to be our venue. Hotel RL is located in a large wooded park, perched in woodlands on a high hill just west of downtown Olympia, overlooking Capital Lake. The hotel is within walking distance of the downtown area, it’s is also a drop site for the airport shuttle and a stop for the free city buses. It has excellent meeting spaces for up to 500 hundred people. Their very comfortable rooms have either a king-sized bed plus couch or two queen-sized beds, so each can accommodate 1 to 4 people. Our special Evergreen Phage Conference price is $100 a night per room, including all breakfasts, whether or not you choose to share the room. All lunches, an evening gala with dinner and dancing, and our traditional Native American Salmon Bake are included with the registration fee, and dietary restrictions may easily be accommodated. The hotel has kindly arranged that payment for rooms can be made in advance or upon arrival. If necessary, room cancellations can be made up until the start of the meeting without penalty.
Information on registration fees is on our website; please contact us should you require assistance with registration. We intend to be fully flexible in meeting the needs of our international participants and will work to enable those who wish to speak remotely to do so. Please inquire about discounts for lab or corporate groups wishing to attend. As always, we will do our best to make this event accessible for those with limited funds. We look forward very much to seeing as many of you as possible both either here or online, and will work with all who are keen to present their research, whether in person or virtually, as a poster or as a talk.
We welcome those interested in contributing suggestions for making this the best meeting yet!
Best wishes,
— Betty Kutter
Sneak-peek: phage genome annotation workshop!
We’re hard at work putting together an unforgettable schedule for all of you, so stay tuned for the program! That said, here’s a sneak peek at one of the sessions we’ve got in store for you!
Get a better handle on your phage bioinformatics skills with a workshop run by the phage enthusiasts behind PATRIC, the bioinformatic resource anyone can use to assemble, annotate and analyze their phage genomes.
Still need convincing? A few phage phans took to Twitter to share their stories…
One last thing: want to sponsor Evergreen?
It’s not too late! Sponsoring lets you get your message out to the community (and makes you look really good!). But most importantly, you’ll have a hand in ensuring the phage community continues to grow through events like these. Thanks so much to our early sponsors, Baylor College of Medicine’s TAILOR Labs, and of course Phagebiotics Research Foundation (Betty’s foundation), which is the main producer of the conference.
To sponsor Evergreen, visit: https://evergreen.phage.directory/sponsorshipp
In closing
Our beloved Evergreen phage meeting will undoubtedly be a bit different this year, but with your help, we hope it will be the magical event we’ve all come to love and look forward to!
Join over 90 phage folks who have already registered for Evergreen, by registering here: Register for Evergreen
