Phycological Society of America 2020 meeting cancelled

PSA logo

Well, my summer travel plans just got downsized. Hot on the heels of Chlamy 2020 deadlines extended, the PSA meeting in Providence, Rhode Island is cancelled:

Greetings fellow phycologists,

I think that we can all agree that the greatest strength of our society is the fantastic folk of which it is comprised. We have members from around the planet, at every stage of professional development, all unified by our love of all things algal. Thus, it is with a heavy heart that after consultation with, and on behalf of, the Executive Committee, we have decided to cancel the meeting in Rhode Island this year for several Covid-19 related reasons.

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Chlamy 2020 deadlines extended

Chlamy 2020

This is straight from the Chlamy 2020 mailing list:

Due to the COVID-19 epidemics, the organizers of Chlamy 2020, the 19th International Conference on the Cell and Molecular Biology of Chlamydomonas, have decided to push all deadlines by 24 days. The early bird registration rates will be available until April 24, i.e. one month before the start of the conference. We hope that this will give you enough time to make an informed decision about your participation to Chlamy 2020. Please visit our website https://chlamy2020.sciencesconf.org for all details on this top-notch meeting.

If you are tempted to participate, please do pre-register now, without paying. It will help us keep track of who would be interested to attend. This way you will receive all the information in due time, and be able to manage travel arrangements so as to benefit from the currently low air fares. Payment of registration fees is suspended for the moment, until we see clearer into our future. But you can deposit your abstract any time. The selection of talks from abstracts is scheduled to take place between April 7 and April 15.

Note that we have pledged to NOT cancel the meeting, whatever happens. At worst, we will postpone it, without changing the location.

Hope to see you at Chlamy 2020 !

The Chlamy 2020 organization committee.

Reminder: early bird registration for Volvox 2019 ends soon

Volvox 2019 logo

If you’re planning to go to the Fifth International Volvox Conference, it’s time to get a move on. Early bird registration and, more importantly, abstract submission end Saturday. Registration is open (at a slightly higher rate) until July 13, but if you want to present a poster or talk, the June 1 deadline applies.

The meeting is July 26-28 in Tokyo and includes a July 29 excursion to the NIES microbial culture collection and the National Museum of Nature and Science.

Volvox newsletter

Volvox newsletter cover

As David Kirk pointed out, what we normally call the First through Fourth International Volvox Meetings are really about the fifth through eighth, as they were preceded by several meetings in the ’70s. The very first meeting was hosted by David and Marilyn Kirk at Washington University in St. Louis. Richard Starr, then at Indiana University, reported on the meeting in the first Volvox Newsletter (Dr. Starr would later move to the University of Texas, and his strains would form the beginning of the UTEX Culture Collection, which is still in operation).

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Travel grants for Volvox 2019

Volvox 2019 logo

The Fifth International Volvox Conference will be July 26-29, 2019 at the University of Tokyo Hongo campus. For past meetings, generous support from organizations such as the American Genetic Association, the Company of Biologists, Wellcome Trust, and the Phycological Society of America has allowed the organizing committee to award travel fellowships to students and postdocs. It’s not yet clear if that will be the case for next year’s meeting.

Stephanie Höhn has helpfully put together a list of outside travel grants available to students and/or postdocs, along with their deadlines and membership requirements:

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Repost: Message from David Kirk

After last week’s sad news that one of the founding fathers of Volvox research, David Kirk, had passed away, I thought it would be relevant to repost a message he sent a couple of years ago. The modern series of Volvox meetings started in 2011 in Arizona, and we’ve been calling them the First through Fourth International Volvox Conferences, with the Fifth scheduled for July 26-29, 2019. Dr. Kirk wrote in with some interesting historical insight about Volvox meetings that long preceded the current series:

I got an email out of the blue from David Kirk, and I thought some of it would be of interest. Dr. Kirk is one of the biggest names in Volvox research: he carried out much of the developmental genetics that forms the foundation of our field, he literally wrote the book on Volvox evo-devo, and my impression is that most of the PIs currently studying Volvox spent time in his lab as students and postdocs.

VolvoxBookCover

The email was prompted by the meeting review from the 2015 meeting in Cambridge (he liked it, whew! :-D), and he said that he’s looking forward to the 2017 meeting in St. Louis. The email also had a footnote with some interesting information, which I quote here with Dr. Kirk’s permission:

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