Call for Oral Presentations and Posters

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Call for Oral Presentations GraphicSunbelt 2023

We are so excited to invite you to submit abstracts for oral and poster presentations at Sunbelt 2023 in Portland, Oregon! You are in for a real treat with Portland - you can expect an amazing combination of urban and natural settings; the best, locally-sourced food you’ll ever eat; and a welcoming city rich with culturally diverse events and tons of fun things to do. Check out travelportland.com for more details about our host city!

We are organizing this year’s Sunbelt to be attended either in-person or online, and we hope that either way you are able to join us and benefit from the incredible community and scholarship that makes Sunbelt our favorite conference each year!

As we all know, the world is a different place these days, and we are doing our best to evolve Sunbelt to be an accessible and engaging meeting while also being as climate-conscious and cost-efficient as possible. As such, there will be aspects of Sunbelt that are new this year, and we look forward to your partnership in seeing how it all goes! Read below for details.

Sunbelt In-Person vs. Sunbelt Online

When you submit your abstract, you will indicate whether you plan to attend Sunbelt in-person or online. The in-person Sunbelt option will operate much like it always has - we will have parallel oral sessions throughout the day along with a poster presentation reception during the conference. In-person presentations will be given on site in Portland during an assigned time slot between Wednesday, June 28th and Saturday, July 1st. Only in-person presentations will occur in Portland, meaning we will not be integrating online sessions into in-person parallel sessions this year. Only on-site attendees will be able to view the on-site presentations. Full transparency: the cost for combining in-person and online sessions together (i.e., typical hybrid format) would bury the organization, and would require far too great of increases in registration costs.

Regarding online paper presentations, we will be hosting synchronous online sessions using the Whova app (used for Sunbelt 2022 and Networks 2021). We will arrange “time-zone friendly” sessions, organizing online presenters together based on their geographic location. We love that Sunbelt spans the entire globe, and we hope this will encourage presentations and attendance that coincides well with where people are, and when people are awake, across the world. That said, all conference attendees (in-person and online) will have the ability to log into an online session through the Whova app.

Simmel and Freeman Award Presentations

The Simmel and Freeman Award presentations will be given in Portland during the in-person conference. We will be recording these talks and subsequently posting them to the Whova app. Simmel and Freeman award speakers will present on-site in Portland and will answer questions live during the conference. They will also later host a Q&A session through Whova for online attendees to have a chance to engage with the speakers in a more focused, online-specific environment.

Presentation Formats

Please be advised that we are changing up what most of us know as “organized sessions” at Sunbelt this year. Instead of submitting organized sessions, folks will have the option to either submit their individual abstract under a predetermined list of topic areas from which we will create organized sessions, or to submit a symposium session, which is a collection of themed abstracts submitted and presented together. Details about each submission type below.   

  • 20-minute Oral Presentation (either in-person or online synchronous): 20 minutes for an oral presentation, delivered “live” in Portland if you are in-person or on Zoom through the Whova app if you are online. Please submit your abstract and indicate up to three topic areas you feel captures your presentation. While we will do our best to honor your preference for an oral presentation, we anticipate some oral presentations will be accepted as poster presentations.
  • Poster (in-person and/or online archive): In-person presenters will stand next to their poster and present their work during the collective Poster Session held during the Portland meeting. Presenters will be expected to bring their printed poster to Portland. Online presenters will provide a digital copy of their poster presentation that attendees can access asynchronously through the Whova app (details on format and file upload to be sent upon acceptance).
  • Symposium Session (either in-person only or online synchronous only): We invite groups of 3-5 oral presentations (4 is ideal) organized around a theme of the presenters’ choosing. Symposium sessions are submitted by a symposium chair who will organize the collection of presentations. Symposium chairs will indicate the title of the symposium, a brief description of the session (150 words max), and the name of the chair person(s). At the time of submission, symposium chairs are expected to submit the titles and abstracts of all presentations to be included in their symposium. Each symposium will last 1 hour and 40 minutes and can be delivered in-person or online. Note: ALL presenters must be in-person if a symposium is to be given in Portland.

Proposal Submission Guidelines

  1. All paper and poster abstracts should be 250 to 500 words, not including the title (and please do not include references), and should include a clear description of the presentation’s purpose, methods, and contributions.
  2. While you may be an author on multiple papers presented at the conference (online or in-person), you may only be first-author on one presentation at Sunbelt 2023.
  3. Proposals will be submitted through the abstract submission system, ConfTool, this year. A ConfTool account is required in order to submit.  If you have an INSNA.org account, please use your same email address to create your ConfTool account.
  4. You may access the submission portal here where you will create a user account and submit your proposal(s): 

Click here to Submit Proposal

Abstract Submission Dates

  • Call for Presentations Opens November 28
  • Submission deadline extended to: February 14, 2023
  • Acceptance notification: February 28, 2023

Questions?

Thank you! We look forward to seeing you - either in-person or online - in June 2023!

Sunbelt 2023 Organizing Committee:

Meg Patterson, Texas A&M University
Eric Jones, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
Tyler Prochnow, Texas A&M University
Rebecca Mauldin, The University of Texas at Arlington
Kayo Fujimoto, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston