For workshops below that require pre-registration, please sign up by clicking the button below.
If you are uncertain about attending the workshop, we request that you refrain from signing up until you’ve decided to attend. If a workshop's pre-registration becomes full, we suggest that you show up to the workshop on site and inquire to see if any seats have opened up.
4 January 2022
Capturing biological motion through interdisciplinary methods
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM, West 102 A
From fruit flies to humans, animals perform complex movements that enable them to respond to their environment and communicate with others across space and time. Capturing and quantifying the intricacies of animal locomotion to understand how the brain functions or how animal behavior evolves has been instrumental for ethologists, neuroscientists, and ecologists for well over a century. Concurrently, the study of human movement and representations of gestures, dance, and interacting bodies has had a significant impact on our understanding of historical and present day cultural practices and social life. Interestingly, both the scientific and social science communities have developed unique approaches to capture pose dynamics and movement at high spatial and temporal resolution. What are these different approaches, what are the advantages and challenges with each, and what can we learn by implementing both techniques in our studies? In this talk, we will hear from Valarie Williams, Professor of Dance and expert in Labanotation, a system for recording and analyzing human movement, as well as Talmo Pereira, Principal investigator in computational neurobiology and developer of SLEAP, a multi-animal pose-tracking software. They will each share their perspectives on motion capture, representing movement, and interpreting such analyses to gain insights into animal and human expression and communication.
Faculty Launch Workshop
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 208 AB
Pre-registration is required
This workshop aims to demystify the postdoc-to-faculty transition in academia. As such, the target audience is late-stage postdocs and pre-tenure faculty, although anyone in the SICB community is welcome to attend. The inaugural workshop (Phoenix, 2022) will lay the foundation for an ongoing training opportunity to be offered annually at the SICB meeting. Panelists from diverse career stages (postdoc, new PI, up for tenure, and full Professor) will provide discussion, advice, and tools to help attendees navigate the final years of their postdoctoral research programs, land their ideal jobs, and survive their first years as newly-minted assistant professors. Proposed topics of discussion include: compiling a competitive job application, giving an effective chalk talk, building and negotiating a startup request, writing a lab prospectus/philosophy statement, recruiting and mentoring diverse personnel, developing and managing budgets, and navigating the tradeoff between data collection and grantsmanship as a new PI. This workshop requires advanced registration so that the discussion topics can be tailored to the interests of the participants. Minutes from the workshop will be archived along with supporting materials (e.g., successful job application materials, examples of start-up request spreadsheets, lab expectation statements, etc.) and archived materials will be available to workshop registrants in perpetuity. The norms for securing faculty jobs, and the expectations placed on junior faculty, change frequently and thus the topics covered in the workshop will evolve over time.
Mentorship and sponsorship: how to curate your support team and guide your successful career
CANCELED 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 102 B
The concept of mentorship and finding mentors can be a stressful endeavor for an early career scientist. But there are tools and a variety of mentor models that can be used to help alleviate this stress. Also understanding the difference between mentors and sponsors can help you develop these relationships. This workshop will be a discussion to learn what to give and gain from your mentors and sponsors to support your own career goals. You will learn the difference between a sponsor and a mentor and how to curate and map your mentor and sponsor relationships with the eventual goal of building your support team based around your career goals. This workshop is geared for late-stage graduate students, post-docs, and early career researchers.
Journal of Experimental Zoology Workshop: How to Get Published
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 102 C
Pre-registration is required
Are you interested in publishing in the Journal of Experimental Zoology--Part A? Join JEZ-A Editor-in-Chief Randy Nelson as he discusses the process, from even before you begin writing through submission and peer review to editorial decision.
Best Practices in Bioinspired Design
3:30 PM – 5:30 PM, Patio 4
This workshop is a community-building opportunity for practitioners and researchers in bioinspired design (BID). The workshop will be an informal meet and greet type event to connect with and form a community of interest in BID. This workshop hopes to foster new collaborations in BID and shape the community's understanding of the future of BID.
5 January 2022
Agile for Academics: providing “people-first” management solutions to research challenges in academia – MOVED TO SICB+
Morning session: 7:00 AM – 8:00 AM, West 102 A
Lunch session: 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 211 B
“Better, faster, with less effort”
Do you feel like your research project has no end in sight? Do you feel overwhelmed in managing groups of student researchers on multiple projects? Are you starting a new project but don’t know how to structure it from start to finish?
Management in academia, whether for a summer research project, an active experiment in the lab, or guiding your students through their Ph.D, is rarely discussed. Scientists are often left to find management strategies on the fly or seek training elsewhere. “Agile for Academics” is a two-part workshop that works to bridge the knowledge gap for academics in management projects. Agile, is a values-based project management methodology, used widely in technology and other industries to effectively manage complex projects in a “lean” and sustainable fashion. Lean process methodology focuses on providing the best value in the shortest sustainable lead time. In other words, “Get it done, but in the most sustainable way, and with the best value for people and society.” Agile leverages lean, and focuses on what’s most important in successfully delivering results on large and/or complex projects. This differs from other project management methodologies that focus purely on work-flow mechanics and static results, without regard to the people and culture that produce those results. This two-part workshop will first, with a morning lecture session to introduce key Agile values, principles, and practices, empowering attendees with skills to tackle their own challenging research projects. The second part of the workshop, a smaller lunch-time session (attendees must register), provides members with hands-on learning experience to internalize content and concepts presented in the morning session.
Better, faster, with less effort - a catchphrase that puts into practice Agile philosophies and achieving the desired outcomes. This process encourages focus on the process, the culture and community, with a goal where the process focuses on the people. Too often we become stuck in a static environment, robotic in the process. People do all the work, and sometimes it’s hard work. Agile enables people to do the hard work that produces the value – that is the reason we’re doing the work. Doug Salcedo teaches, “It’s more important to be Agile, than do Agile.”
Morning session (lecture style):
An interactive lecture on Agile, its four-part manifesto, key principles, and primary implementation practices. Attendees will be encouraged to contribute ideas for large group-think moments throughout the lecture with their laptop/phone via an online whiteboard tool and chat.
Lunch session (hands-on, interactive):
Deep-dive in applying Agile to academic research projects. Presentation of examples and ideas of how and where to implement agile. Attendees are encouraged to bring management or research management problems from their own experience that could be improved by applying Agile. Group discussion will be encouraged with the aim of attendees walking out with a follow-up plan on how to proceed with implementing agile in their project.
Brown bag lunch on funding sources for undergraduate serving institutions
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 101 ABC
Pre-registration is required
This information session helps PIs at undergraduate serving institutions understand access to funds available for their research. Many researchers at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions may not have the ability to apply for or the need for large grants. Others would benefit from information about how to compose a competitive large grant from a PUI. Information on the types of grants available for PUIs would be helpful.
Animation for Ani-motion: challenges of representing animal movement in different media
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 102 A
Researchers studying animal movements often wish to re-create or manipulate animal behaviors to ask questions about function, perception, and the consequences of variation in motion. One popular method is using video playback, which relies on the construction and reliable manipulation of digital animal models. Researchers also employ robotic recreations of natural movements to probe the behavioral responses of live animals. Visual effects animator John Truong joins us this year along with a panel of biologists with expertise in bio-robotics and animation to discuss the technical challenges and new frontiers associated with mimicking animal movement. This is a discussion-based panel with some demonstrations, followed by a question-and-answer session.
6 January 2022
NSF Program Officers: Updates from BIO
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 102 A
Pre-registration is required
NSF Program Directors from the BIO Divisions of Environmental Biology, Integrative Organismal Biology, and Biological Infrastructure will present information on new and continuing programs and funding opportunities for SICB members.
Science Communication Skills
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 211 B
Pre-registration is required
What are the best ways to communicate your research and engage people with it? This workshop will focus on all aspects including storytelling, art/audiovisual methods, software, techniques with software, online "SciComm", open source tools and more.
Bioacoustic data collection and analysis, with an intro to Koogu — a customizable machine learning toolkit
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 102 B
Pre-registration is required
Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) is a powerful tool for studying the distribution and behavior of animals. Recent technological advances facilitate collecting long-term acoustic recordings and extracting detailed information about the species present. In this workshop, we will provide a brief introduction to the different equipment and software tools commonly used in PAM undertakings, and demonstrate a new Python package (Koogu - pypi.org/project/koogu) with which attendees can train custom machine learning models for detecting and classifying sounds of interest in field recordings. Pre-registration required for access to workshop materials.
PAC Workshop: Decolonizing Science
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, TBD
Pre-registration is required
This workshop is about decolonizing science – what that means and ways to move modern science in an equitable and ethical direction – and will be led by Dr. Madhusudan Katti, Associate Professor of Public Science at North Carolina State University, and Dr. Jennifer D. Roberts, Associate Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland.
TAL-X: Teaching the inevitable: embracing failure in the classroom
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM, West 211 B
Failure is often taken as a given in higher education, as an inevitable part of learning new things. Yet, it remains a part of learning students tend to fear and faculty tend to neglect. As educators, we do not always strategize with or leverage our students’ struggles and failures for improved learning. Instead, we hope that students learn from their mistakes and study harder or try harder the next time, because moving on with material in class is necessary to meet learning objectives. Creating space in any course for students to take intellectual risks without risking their grades is an essential aspect of inclusive excellence. In this workshop, we will discuss overarching teaching philosophies and strategies for structuring and incorporating assignments to incorporate a “pedagogy of failure” into our work with students. Topics will include growth vs. fixed mindset, fostering conversations about failure, contract/specifications grading, mastery grading, and more.
7 January 2022
Tracking Animal Movement Data with Machine Learning: DeepLabCut
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, West 101 ABC
Pre-registration is required
Machine learning has the potential to drastically decrease the time spent on data analysis in the field of animal behavior. Many new tools have come on-board to facilitate the automated detection and tracking of animal movement from video footage. In this workshop, we aim to introduce participants to a popular open-access software package for pose estimation and movement detection, DeepLabCut. Participants will get an overview of software structure, touching on both hardware and software requirements to successfully run the programs as well as the typical data analysis pipeline. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and discuss challenges/features of their own data with DeepLabCut’s co-developer. Laptop and pre-registration required.
