Pioneer Valley Microbiology Symposium, Photo Courtesy of Maggie Donovan ‘21
By Imaan Moin ’22
Staff Writer
Presenting at scientific conferences can be difficult for early-career scientists, especially with the logistical challenge of traveling to these events. Microbiologists in the Five College Consortium and beyond have the advantage of having a symposium right in their own backyard. The Pioneer Valley Microbiology Symposium is an annual graduate-student-run one-day scientific symposium hosted at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Undergraduate students, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty members who conduct microbiology research are invited to present their work. Mount Holyoke College microbiologists — professors and students alike — often attend this symposium.
The symposium has typically been held in the Integrated Sciences Building at UMass Amherst in mid-to-late January since its founding in 2016. In 2021 and 2022, it had to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last year, the symposium shifted to an entirely virtual format using the website, “Gathertown.io.” This year, the symposium has been postponed until Saturday, March 5, due to the wave of the Omicron variant of COVID-19. The symposium organizers “hope to be able to meet everyone in-person” once the wave passes, according to the PVMS website.
Amy Hitchcock Camp, associate professor of biological sciences at Mount Holyoke College, thinks scientific conferences like PVMS are important to student scientists, especially when they are in person. “I’m really impressed and proud of what [the PVMS committee] put together remotely, but it just really feels still like such a huge loss to not have these conferences in person,” Camp said.
At the first PVMS in 2016, Camp presented a keynote speech on “feeding tubes and switches in bacterial development.” Camp said that giving a keynote talk “felt really special and cool.” Camp and her lab have been active participants in PVMS since 2016, with multiple members of the Camp Lab presenting posters and a few giving talks during the sessions as well.
“The fact there is a meeting here locally, in the Pioneer Valley, connecting us to our community here in Western Mass just feels super special,” Camp said. “It’s been really great, and I think they did a really impressive job last year with the remote version.”
Multiple Mount Holyoke College professors, including Clare Boothe Luce assistant professor of biochemistry Katie Berry and assistant professor of biological sciences Rebeccah Lijek — leaders of the Berry Lab and Lijek Lab respectively– often bring their research students to PVMS. “There’s this big Mount Holyoke microbiology contingent,” Camp explained. In 2020, the Camp Lab, the Berry Lab and the Lijek Lab attended PVMS together.
For scientists preparing to present at PVMS, the first step is to submit an abstract. Once the abstract is submitted and accepted to the symposium, speakers prepare the presentation. At PVMS, there are a handful of guests that give talks alongside the keynote speakers. The website guidelines state that talks can last a total of 20 minutes, with 15 minutes of presentation and five minutes of answering questions. The other option is to present a poster that has the details of a scientific research project, which is what many undergraduate students do at PVMS.
The day of the symposium is typically structured into multiple sessions that consist of keynotes speeches, talks and poster sessions. Not everyone who attends must present, however. Pioneer Valley microbiologists sometimes attend just to watch the talks and poster presentations. At the end of the symposium, awards for “Best Poster” and “Best Talk” are handed out, usually in the form of small hand-made sculptures shaped like microscopes.
In 2020, PVMS was sponsored by Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and the UMass departments of Microbiology, Food Science, Chemical Engineering, Animal Science, Animal Biotechnology & Biomedical Sciences, Molecular & Cell Biology and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. PVMS was also supported by the companies New England BioLabs, ThermoFisher Scientific and Conagen. According to the PVMS Twitter account, sponsors for PVMS 2022 include the companies Conagen and Eppendorf.
The keynote speakers for this year’s PVMS are Dr. Lesley-Ann Giddings of Smith College, Dr. Batbileg Bor of the Forsyth Institute and Berry. Berry will be presenting on her research on “sgRNAs and their interactions with proteins in disease-causing bacteria,” according to the PVMS website. Students from the Five College Consortium and beyond will be giving their own talks and speaking at the poster presentation sessions. The Camp Lab will likely be in attendance again this year.
The symposium’s slogan is “Are You a Valley Microbe?” By attending PVMS and engaging with the microbiology research happening in the Pioneer Valley, the Valley Microbe population can expand, and this student-run symposium can continue to spread knowledge and allow early-career microbiologists to get their first scientific presentations under their belts.