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| | [[Symposium checklist]] | | [[Symposium checklist]] |
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| | [[Keynote Speakers]] | | [[Keynote Speakers]] |
| − | Keynote speakers are the heart of any scientific meeting and even more important on international ones. Every person that usually attend scientific meetings work at universities or scientific institutes and meet and talk to other researchers on regular basis. However, international conferences and symposia represent those opportunities in which you can listen to one of your favorite researchers in the field, those that wrote the articles you have been reading in your undergraduate years, PhD years or son on. If you pretend people to attend your event which means stop working for a couple of days, travelling, staying in a hotel and paying the registration fee, you really need to provide them with a very attractive set of keynote talks. With the increasing amount of specialized conferences and very specific symposia that are usually organized everywhere in the world, not being able to find good keynotes might be the reason for which a given person decides to attend a different event instead of yours.
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| − | It is never to early to think about potential keynotes, even more if you take into account that most of the people you would really like to be a keynote in your symposium are really occupied researchers that are constantly travelling and have very busy agendas.
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| − | The first thing you need to think about is that not because you think about the perfect keynote for your symposium that person is going to accept to be one. So the best thing you can do is to make a list of potential keynotes in order of preference and start contacting them as soon as possible (4-6 months in advance should be enough) for a first contact.
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| − | When you create your list of potential keynotes, you may want to pay attention for the following things:
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| − | 1) How many keynotes you want to have. Having 2 keynotes is the most likely for a 1-day event. Two keynotes leave enough time for the student, sponsor and industry presentations, coffee breaks and poster sessions. You may want to include a 3rd keynote, but be aware that you will need to cut time, somewhere else.
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| − | 2) Gender balance: In every international event or society, is more and more common to have special care to balance gender representation in every aspect. If you have decided to have 2 keynotes, the best thing you can do is to select a man and a woman.
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| − | 3) Topics balance: As we started, keynotes are the core of your event because of that, you may want to include in the topics that will be covered by the keynotes as much audience as possible. For example, if you confirm a first keynote that will talk about metagenomics, it is not a good idea to have a second one on a closely related field but from a different one, i.e structural bioinformatics, algorithms design, high-performing computing or so on.
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| − | 4) Always try to use some person who already has contacted the potential keynote to see if he/she can make it to your event. Senior scientists usually receive dozens of mails a day and have secretaries that filter their inbox for them If you write these guys without knowing them, they will probably never get the mail.
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| − | 5) The most important point, keynotes are just that KEYnotes. Be sure to attach to the core concept of the word, you really want to have a a good keynote, someone who is well known in the field. A good way to check that is to talk to some postdoctoral researchers or senior PhD students. Also, looking at their scholar or scopus profiles is a good way (although subjective some times) to sense how recognized the researcher is. You can look at his/her h-index. Although metrics like the h-index have been object of discussion about measuring scientific success, they work as a good approximation at high levels. You can look for your favorite researcher's h-index to have an idea.
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| − | 6) Do not spend too much time waiting for someone, set deadlines in case you have a negative answer or not answer at all to start contacting the next candidates on the list.
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Here you can find some extra information on how we typical setup a Student Council Symposium.
