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Keystone Symposia Alumni and New Participants,
Keystone Symposia's mission – to connect the scientific community and be a catalyst to accelerate discoveries that benefit society – challenges every one who contributes to the success of this organization. A winning conference is marked by energetic participation, contacts made that lead to collaborations, and participants leaving with insights that accelerate or change direction of their research. What investigator can't remember awakening at 3 AM with a discerning, must-do experiment on their mind that keeps them up the rest of the night anticipating outcomes. That's the kind of excitement I want Keystone Symposia to generate.
From the early days, we sought to bring together participants with diverse backgrounds because we believe that studying a problem from multiple viewpoints optimizes chances for breakthrough ideas. That is why we frequently use the "joint conference" approach, in which two symposia are held concurrently with some shared sessions, to facilitate innovative interactions. Used optimally, the joint meetings meld two hot topics that are on collision courses with each other to accelerate progress in both areas.
For years Keystone Symposia were held exclusively in retreat-like venues, mostly mountain resorts in the USA and Canada, because the atmosphere is conducive for both planned and spontaneous sharing of information, data, and knowledge. Although the conferences have always attracted international participation (about one-third of attendees are from outside North America), we have recently adopted a global strategy to make the Keystone Symposia scientific experience more widely available. In 2005 we held our first conference outside North America, in Singapore on Stem Cells, Senescence, and Cancer, which was attended by 442 scientists from 27 countries. This was followed by a conference at Cambridge University in England, a second in Singapore, and now planned for fall 2007 are conferences in Cape Town, South Africa and Beijing, China, and in spring of 2008, meetings in Kampala, Uganda, Killarny, Ireland, and Alpbach, Austria. As we increase our meetings in countries around the world, the involvement of the global scientific community will grow, and so will participation from developing nations. Our objective is to catalyze worldwide growth in capacity for outstanding science.
Another tactic of the strategy to grow science capacity is to ensure that increasing numbers of scientists from developing countries are able to attend Keystone Symposia in North America. Because of generous support, initially from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation but now also from others, Keystone Symposia is able to offer Travel Awards to conferences in our Global Health Series. These awards provide sufficient funds so that a scientist, physician, postdoctoral trainee, or graduate student from a developing country can afford to attend one of these conferences.
Attendance has been growing steadily. A record number of participants, 13,500, attended the 50 conferences in the 2007 season. The average size of our conferences is about 270 attendees, with 30 to 40% being graduate students or postdoctoral trainees. A goal is to increase our ability to support young scientists and maintain Keystone Symposia as premier venues for interaction between young and established investigators. I am thrilled that in 2007 we were able to award scholarships to students and postdoctoral fellows, well over 600, which is up ten-fold since 1997 when we became an independent 501 (c)(3) non-profit educational organization.
This season (September '07 to June '08), we will have 56 conferences, including five conferences outside of North America. Keystone Symposia is committed to nurturing development of new scientists worldwide, but this requires more than we can do alone. Our success is highly dependent on the generous amount of time committed by leading scientists/mentors and also by generous donations from supporting organizations and individuals. I want to sincerely thank everyone who contributes to the success of Keystone Symposia.
James W. Aiken, Ph.D.
President and Chief Executive Officer
jimaiken@keystonesymposia.org
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