Building on the enthusiasm of our first virtual annual meeting in 2020, we brought the C-DEBI community together through 13 virtual meetings in 2021-2022. The virtual meeting series events were held monthly during the first week of each month, with a regular rotation of science workshops and professional development workshops. Each workshop contained 90 minutes of programming, including plenary presentations by invited speakers, a community building breakout session, and a plenary Q&A session. To foster an open environment for data sharing and discussion, most sessions were not recorded.
Future Transition of the Virtual Meeting Series
C-DEBI nurtured a community of deep biosphere experts, and that expertise is urgently needed to inform new emerging uses of the deep sea, especially in the rocky parts of the deep sea, such as potential removal of rocks for industrial mineral interests or using the deep sea as a repository for carbon dioxide to address global warming. This has led to the initiation of the COBRA program, a new research coordination network with the mission to accelerate the research on these types of topics, so that scientists can inform decision making.
Sign up for the COBRA newsletter to stay connected to the webinar series launching soon as part of the COBRA mission to help with coordination, knowledge sharing and training of all of us who care about microbes in the deep sea with policymakers.
Previous Meetings
See the previous virtual series topics and speakers
Organizing Committee
Joy Buongiorno, Maryville College
James Bradley, Queen Mary University of London
Sajjad Akam, Iowa State University
Rosalynn Sylvan, C-DEBI Managing Director, University of Southern California
Beth Orcutt, C-DEBI Senior Scientist, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences