The annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics — arguably the premier human genetics conference in North America — takes place in October or November each year. The planning for that meeting’s content obviously begins much earlier. Of the various session types for academic content, the most visible type is the featured symposium, previously called the invited session. These are themed 90-minute sessions featuring four speakers, two moderators, and optionally some kind of interactive discussion. They are proposed by the presenters in January-February each year and selected by the ASHG Program Committee. Since the deadline to submit session proposals for the 2025 ASHG meeting in Boston is fast approaching (February 10th), I thought I’d share a few words of advice.
Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions, not official views of ASHG or any of its committees.
These tips come from both my experience as a former member of the Program Committee and someone who’s successfully proposed at least four featured symposia in recent memory. The most recent of those was For the children: Genomics to improve the health of pediatric patients and their families which we presented at the 2024 meeting in Denver. I’m not putting in a proposal this year, so please allow me to help you out.
Tip 1: The submission deadline comes early.
This is because the featured symposia are the first sessions programmed by the PC and it’s a time-consuming process. By the time most people are thinking about ASHG meeting abstracts (June), the featured symposia will already be finalized. It can be hard to pull together all of the pieces required for a good session proposal this early in the year. Honestly, I’ve had the most success when I started planning a proposal with a colleague at the annual meeting itself. Start early, because you’ll need to line up four willing speakers along with their abstracts, and at least one additional moderator (the proposer is automatically moderator 1).
Also, if you’re planning to submit, be aware that the submission deadline (like many ASHG submission deadlines) is 5:00 pm Eastern time. Not 11:59 pm as some of us are used to. Don’t miss the deadline.
Tip 2: You need more than a title and four abstracts.
The submission form will ask for several things, many of which are subject to strictly enforced character limits. Note, these sections and limits are based on my 2024 submission:
- The session title (bonus for catchy or memorable ones), session type (scientific/education, or DEI, or ELSI), and the most applicable ASHG subject topic.
- A session description (1500 characters), which is what it sounds like: a summary of the broad content theme of the session, the focus of each speaker’s presentation, and maybe one sentence on the interactive portion.
- A session rationale (2500 characters), in which you make your case as to why this symposium merits a slot on the highly competitive ASHG schedule. Things like importance of the topic to the community, timeliness of the content, and how nicely all of the talks fit together with broad audience appeal will be good to emphasizse.
- A description of the panel discussion or interactive component (2500 characters). Most featured symposia now have these, so it’s good to have something a bit more formal than “we’ll let people ask questions.”
- A summary of the target audience, i.e. the types of people who will be most interested in this session.
- Four learning objectives that must follow the verb-first format of CME learning objectives. Each of these should complete the phrase “After this session, the audience will be able to ____”. I hate writing these.
- A description of how your proposal and speakers contribute to diverse representation and perspectives of speakers at the ASHG annual meeting. This one is super important, discussed more below.
- Four proposed speakers, their names, contact information, presentation title, and presentation abstract.
All of these fields factor in to the PC’s choices, so make the most of them. Be sure that you follow the directions and meet all requirements for the proposal.
Tip 3: Diversity of speakers and moderators is crucial.
Honestly, the reason that most proposals are triaged (declined) at the early stage is that they fail to provide enough diversity in the panel. There are several key dimensions on which diversity of speakers (and to some extent, moderators) will be measured. These include
- Gender. The easiest way to fail is to propose four male speakers. Seriously. It does not matter how strong your arguments are, how prominent the speakers are, etc. If you have a 3/1 speaker ratio, try to balance it out with moderators).
- Race/Ethnicity. This is what most people think about when they hear the word diversity. It’s obviously impossible to represent every group, but your speakers should not all be from the same group.
- Career stage. ASHG loves trainees, so the more the better. At least one speaker must be a trainee, which is a new requirement this year.
- Institution, city, and geographic location. The four speakers should be from different institutions (almost required), ideally ones based in different cities and covering different parts of the country or world. You CAN have a moderator and speaker from the same institution, but two speakers at the same institution will be a very tough sell. Try to spread it across time zones at the very least. I can’t tell you how many proposals I saw with four speakers from the east coast or four from Boston alone.
Balancing diversity is one of the most challenging parts of the proposal. If you haven’t done it well enough but your proposal is still strong, you may be asked to make some changes to balance it. Which leads me to:
Tip 4: Be prepared to make changes to your proposal, moderators, and speakers.
ASHG featured symposium proposals are usually triaged in a couple of phases. Maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of them make the first cut. Most of these will have feedback from the PC and will be invited to revise their proposals to address that feedback. If you make this cut, you’ll have a PC liaison to guide you on the requested changes and how to address them. You should be aware, and make sure your speakers are aware, that you may be asked to swap out a speaker or moderator. The PC knows that this sucks, and will not make the request lightly, but I find it goes over better if everyone knows in advance that it’s a possibility. You could even be asked to combine your proposal with another similar proposal. Then you’d likely keep just two speakers. It doesn’t happen often but it can happen.
Revisions are completely optional. You don’t have to do any of them, and your proposal will still be considered at the next phase. However, even if you disagree with feedback it’s good to demonstrate an effort. In my PC days, we occasionally got proposals for sessions, gave thoughtful feedback, and later heard that the proposers did not wish to make any changes at all. If memory serves, those PC discussions were… short. There are always many more proposals than session slots, so you should try to make an effort.
Tip 5: Abstracts need to be well-written with sufficient detail.
If you haven’t learned this already, the abstract is important when submitting to ASHG. It’s especially true in June, when you’re competing for an oral presentation or plenary slot, but it also applies here. The overall session proposal gives you space to contextualize each speaker’s topic, but you want a solid abstract and descriptive title for each. Everyone understands that it’s 9 months away so not all information may be in hand. Still, it’s good to throw in some numbers (sample size especially), some experimental lingo, and a few key results if possible. The PC needs to have some idea of what it’s getting, e.g. whether the speaker is going to talk about one patient or one hundred or ten thousand. The PC may ask you to provide some details for certain abstracts if you make it past stage 1, but it’s better if they don’t have to.
Tip 6: Give thought to session cohesiveness, speaker order, and content flow.
Once you have your speakers and abstracts somewhat finalized, you should give thought to the order of presentation. Will some speakers set up later presentations nicely? Is there a logical flow from one topic to the next? Speaker order is the easiest thing to change throughout the process, but it’s useful to spend a little time planning this. If all else fails, here’s a simple strategy:
- Put your best presentation first. That could be a well-known speaker or the largest shiniest dataset or the most compelling topic, but you want to start out strong. There’s a practical logic behind this as well: featured symposia usually run in parallel, which means ASHG attendees have to choose between several sessions. You want them to pick your session because of the leadoff speaker, after which they’re more likely to stay for the rest.
- Put your second-best presentation last. This may or may no be possible, and all things being equal I’d say that presentation flow is more important. However, a good speaker in the fourth position will keep people in the room (or draw them) for the panel discussion or interactive portion at the end.
Tip 7: Be prepared to wait a long time to hear about your session proposal.
Because “be patient” is the least helpful advice ever, I’ll tell you a bit about what happens behind the scenes. The sessions are all collected, assembled, and initially reviewed for completeness by ASHG staff. Then they have to prepare review materials for the PC members. Depending on the number of proposals, they generally will be split into two sets, with half of the PC assigned to one set and the other half to the other. The PC sub-teams will have wide-ranging expertise. They all have to read these proposals, score them, and be prepare to discuss them at the next PC meeting. That takes time because PC members are all volunteers and have to fit this work in around with their normal day-job responsibilities. As a policy, ASHG staff and the PC will not usually tell any proposers that they’re out of the running until that is a certainty. If you hear from the PC, it may not be until March or early April.
You may not hear from the PC at all, which is hard to interpret. Most likely, if you don’t hear from a PC liaison by April it means that you didn’t make the initial cut. However, there is a slight chance that you’re proposal is strong enough not to need any revisions. That happened to me once and it was a total surprise. The normal path to proposal acceptance is getting feedback through a PC liaison, revising as best and as quickly as possible (generally they give you about a week), and then crossing your fingers.
Tip 8: Featured symposia are a lot of work, but totally worth it.
This seems like a heavy workload at a busy time for most people. However, there’s a huge upside: if your proposal is chosen, then you have a prominent 90 minute slot on the highly competitive ASHG schedule. Featured symposia go on the schedule first and thus get the longest promotional period. Also, your speakers get more time: 15 minutes, compared to 10 minutes for a typical platform session chosen from the abstracts. Besides that, you get to plan your entire session and its content, which is a rare luxury.
There’s one final and very good reason to put in a proposal for a featured symposium: better odds. Because of the heavy lift required for the proposals and how soon they’re due, ASHG doesn’t get an overwhelming number. Your odds of success are probably 15-20%, which is roughly twice your odds of having a June abstract selected for an oral presentation.
Since you read to the end of this, I’ll share one final but important tip: whenever possible, your speakers should be ASHG members (currently or planned). That’s for the simple reason that non-ASHG speakers get some of their travel covered by the organization. There’s not a lot of money in the budget for this, so you should generally not put forth more than one speaker who is a non-member.
Good luck! Submit your featured symposium here.
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