This week, we attended Phage Futures Congress 2019, which was put on by Kisaco Research (major shoutout to Jade Osei-Tutu, the lead organizer, for her incredible work bringing together so many phage people). We’re still reeling from all the new contacts we made, and the exciting conversations we had with people from phage biotechs, pharma companies, the FDA, and with phage researchers from around the world.

In our opinion, the conference was a huge success, and our expectations were definitely surpassed. We’re still processing our notes on the various talks, but plan to bring these to you soon in the form of a more comprehensive run-down.

Pilot project: Live conference coverage

In the meantime, you can have a look at the Phage Futures Live page we created for this event. This was a project we piloted for this conference, and our goal was to bring insights from the conference online in a way that would outlast the conference itself. Essentially, we live-tweeted the event, but saved the live tweets in one place on our site, alongside the agenda (so you can see who spoke) and poster abstracts.

We hope this can help jog the memories of attendees now that the conference is over, and that it can help fill in those who were not able to attend. We hope it can inspire ideas and collaborations for the phage community!

Thank you Curtis!

Importantly, we want to express our heartfelt thanks to Curtis Hoffmann @phagehunter, whose help with the live event coverage was IMMENSE and much appreciated. Curtis is an IPATH intern and BYU undergraduate student who is brimming with ideas on how to move phage research and phage therapy forward (and commitment to put these ideas into action), and we’re so glad to have been connected with him!

Send us your conference notes!

As we put together a more comprehensive retrospective on the conference, it would be great if anyone who attended the conference could send us any notes/impressions they took during/after the two days! Even if it’s just a rough set of jot-notes taken during some of the talks, or after-the-fact impressions/thoughts/ideas, it would be very cool for us to see what people found interesting or important, and to see if there are patterns that emerge or divergent impressions that people had. Like a survey, but more raw (and hopefully less work)!

We’d love to share any insights (and quotes) we gain from this with all of you (and we’re happy to keep your contributions as anonymous as you’d like)!

If you’re more of a survey person

If a traditional survey is more your style, we’ve created a quick 3-question survey. This is for our own purposes and is distinct from Kisaco Research’s official event survey, which you can fill out here. Note: we also highly suggest you fill out theirs, as you’ll get access to speaker slideshows if you do!

Thanks for reading!
– Jessica <>={