2021-2022 C-DEBI Virtual Meeting Series
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.
2011-2021 C-DEBI Annual Meetings
Members of the C-DEBI community met annually to report on and discuss presently-active, C-DEBI-funded research and education and outreach projects. The size of the meetings were limited to approximately 70 people to support well-integrated discussions; priority invitation was given to those C-DEBI participants with active grants who had not presented on their work previously.
2017-2022 Deep Subsurface Microbiology Collaborative Workshops
C-DEBI collaborates with external partners such as the Deep Life science community of the Sloan-Foundation funded Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) and the U.S. Science Support Program (USSSP) associated with the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP).
- 2017 workshops included the DCO-C-DEBI Deep Life Cultivation Workshop (5-6 November, Rotorua, New Zealand) organized by Jan Amend, Doug Bartlett and Fumio Inagaki, the first annual International Geobiology Society Conference (11-14 June, Banff, Alberta, Canada), the Axial Seamount Drilling Workshop (11-13 October, LDEO), and Assessment of the JOIDES Resolution in Meeting the Challenges of the IODP Science Plan (26-27 September, Denver).
- 2018 workshops included Microorganisms and Organic Carbon in the Marine Subsurface, (March 11-13, Knoxville, TN; workshop publication), C-DEBI/CCB (Center for Computational Biology) Evolution Workshop (March 22-23, Simons Foundation Flatiron Institute), and Deep Sea Mining Impacts on Microbial Ecosystem Services (April 18-19, Bigelow Laboratory).
- 2019 workshops included the 2nd annual International Geobiology Society Conference (June 9-13, Banff, Alberta, Canada), the Microbial Single Cell Genomics Workshop (September 22-26, Bigelow Laboratory), and the C-DEBI NextGen Workshop (November 9-11, Monterey, CA) organized by C-DEBI early career researchers Ben Tully, Jackie Goordial and Sarah Hu.
- Due to travel limitations during the COVID-19 pandemic, the workshops in 2020 included the Geobiology Gordon Research Conference (January 12-17, Galveston, TX), while the International Workshop on Microbial Life under Extreme Energy Limitation was postponed until 2022 (tentatively September 5-9, Sandbjerg Manor, Denmark).
2015-2017 Introduction to Bioinformatics Workshop
Designed to be interactive and hands-on by C-DEBI’s Bioinformatic Specialist, Dr. Benjamin Tully, the C-DEBI ‘Introduction to Bioinformatics’ workshop provides a baseline for geoscientists interested in the basics of bioinformatic processing for microbial genomic data. The two-day workshop has hosted 34 researchers from C-DEBI member labs in three different instances of the workshop (Dec 2015, Dec 2016, and Feb 2017).
2015-2016 Research Focus Area Workshops
In 2015, the C-DEBI theme workshops were replaced by biome (basement and sediment) workshops integrated across the research themes to review the state of knowledge at the end of Phase 1. Subsequently, a workshop on the origins and movement of life was held in conjunction with the Deep Carbon Observatory in 2016.
2010-2014 Research Theme Team Workshops
In the initial phase of C-DEBI, the following four themes were the focus of C-DEBI research, providing a conceptual framework for scientific investigation supported by C-DEBI across a broad scientific community: Activity, Extent of Life, Limits to Life, and Evolution and Survival. For each of these themes, Theme Team Leaders regularly brought together experts within and outside of C-DEBI to identify new research directions within each theme. Based on these “think tank” conversations, the Theme Team Leaders developed Requests for Proposals for the initial phase of C-DEBI small grants and fellowship programs.
2008-2014 Kickoff and DEBI RCN (Research Coordination Network) Meetings
In 2008, a dedicated “kickoff” meeting identified circa 30 “founding members” and developed a framework for developing a community and a sustained institute for deep biosphere research. With the DEBI RCN, we held annual, theme-based meetings to address the research and coordination efforts of the growing deep biosphere community.