By Veronica Groves, PhD candidate at McGill University

Between July 8^th-11^th 2025 I participated in the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) 2025 annual conference in Antwerp, Belgium thanks to support from the QCBS Excellence Award. For the first time in my career, I attended a conference not only as a presenter, but also as a session organizer. Alongside Dr. Britney Firth (University of Waterloo) and Dr. Sean Tomlinson (Government of Western Australia), I helped organize a session on “Shared challenges and diverse approaches to physiology in conservation across taxonomic boundaries”, in which I also presented a research talk on “The challenges related to using the minnow Blackchin Shiner (Miniellus heterodon) as a surrogate for the Threatened Pugnose Shiner (Miniellus anogenus)”.

At this point, I have attended many conferences as a presenter (the blog post by Brielle Comartin remains a great resource for do’s and don’ts – https://lebeagle.qcbs.ca/blog/the-dos-and-donts-of-an-international-conference-a-masters-students-perspective/), however organizing and co-chairing a session required a different set of skills that I would like to share here.

First, why try to organize a session as a graduate student? For one, I found that organizing a session as a PhD student allowed me to increase my academic profile by putting myself on more people’s radars. When you organize a session, your name appears in the booklet, and you are on stage introducing speakers, both of which may mean that more eyes are on you. Secondly, it allowed me to get greater insight into what organizers look for in submitted abstracts, which can inform how I submit my work for future conferences. Thirdly -and this is conference specific – but there can be additional funding available to session organizers that can help offset the cost of attending the meeting.

But how do you go about organizing a session? This can really depend on the type of conference. SEB strongly encourages early career researchers (ECR) to participate in organizing sessions – and they advertise it as such. Other conferences may not explicitly say that ECRs are welcome to submit a session, but you do not know until you ask (as I say, “shooters shoot”). If you do end up deciding to organize a session, I found that it was very helpful to collaborate with more experienced colleagues. Dr. Firth was someone that I actually met at my very first conference in 2022 and we remained in contact (which speaks to the power of networking and building relationships!), and they reached out to me, as a more junior ECR to ask if I wanted to collaborate on the session as we both study the eco-physiology of species at risk in Canada. Then, we wrote an abstract detailing what we were looking for in a session and submitted it to SEB. For reference, our abstract was: 

“Surrogate species, defined as a species that effectively represents another species that is usually the target of research, are suggested as a tool in applied conservation ecology to overcome limited data availability to inform decisions (Caro et al., 2005; Cooke et al., 2017; Castaneda et al., 2021). Surrogates can be a closely related species, or a member of the same target species but from a different geographical area (Castaneda et al., 2021). They can be selected based on similar traits such as habitat use, physiology, or phylogeny, and ideally they would respond to a stressor in the same way as the target species. However, there are major challenges to using surrogate species, namely identifying a suitable candidate and interpreting the results. Comparative physiology is a technique that we can use to bridge the gap between target and surrogate species by understanding how and why some species are winners vs losers when faced with anthropogenic stress.”

Once a session is accepted, what is next? Well, for SEB we were tasked with reaching out to prospective speakers, reviewing and accepting the abstract submissions and building a schedule for the session. These were tasks that had to be completed ahead of time. Then, on the day of the session, we had to briefly introduce each speaker, keep time so that they did not go over their allotted slot, and ask questions if there were no audience questions. An important tip here is to ask the speakers in advance how to pronounce their name (there is nothing worse than when you are introduced wrong) and I recommend writing out the phonetic spelling so that you can introduce everyone properly. 

Hopefully this blog can empower other ECR to branch out and take on greater roles in their academic and scientific societies as session chairs!

About the author:

Veronica Groves is a PhD candidate in the Biology Department at McGill University under the supervision of Prof. Lauren Chapman. Having completed a H.BSc. Agri. Envr at McGill University and MSc. at Concordia University, Veronica specializes in the impacts of multiple stressors on freshwater fish behaviour, physiology, and life-history through the lens of conservation.