New for 2024: Small Tweaks Aimed at Broad Benefit

We are pleased to draw your attention to some of the important changes and updates we have made to our planning for the 2024 AFS annual meeting, as you may have already seen in the Preliminary Program we released last week. 

First and foremost, take a look at a slate of useful and interesting programs we have planned for Wednesday, all before our primary Welcome events begin that evening. These are planned to dovetail with pre-conference activities and offer some additional space in the meeting program. 

In addition to scheduling more programming on Wednesday, we have avoided scheduling any standard paper or forum sessions before 10:30am on Saturday morning, opting to fill the early morning time with networking gatherings and special events instead. 

One of those morning networking opportunities on November 9 is a showcase and meet-and-greet gathering we will facilitate for poster presenters who are present in Albuquerque. We hope attendees will join us there to enjoy the Poster Showcase and to talk with presenters about their projects. Poster presenters who cannot join us in Albuquerque will be able to present their work and network with attendees during the virtual poster session on Nov. 19. 

To address the perennial concern of too much going on at one time, and not enough audience to go around, we’ve reduced the maximum number of concurrent programs from around 15 to no more than 12 or 13 over our 9 session time blocks. Naturally, this is a measured reduction, intended to balance this shift with our commitment to providing broad and equitable access to presentation opportunities. We thank all the many submitters who expressed flexibility and openness to new presentation formats, in support of the best program we can plan. 

We will continue to highlight sessions and events in our rich annual meeting program over the coming months. Please follow the Annual Meeting News to get the latest information.