Slides for talk: Marine Host-Microbiome Interactions: Challenges and Opportunities

Posted slides for a talk I gave at Scripps Institute for Oceanography last week.

Another Mostly Male Meeting from UCSD- should be called "Food and Fuel for the 19th Century"

Well, just when I thought meeting organizers from UCSD had learned their lesson regarding mostly male meetings - this comes along.  Check out "Food and Fuel for the 21st Century" (I was pointed to this by a comment on a blog post of mine). The speakers are
That a ratio of 18:2 or 10% female.  

Not that I know the cause of this but here are some other pieces of information to consider.

The Food and Fuel for the 21st Century Program lists 5 people on their Executive Committee.  Any guesses on the # of these that are men?  Well it is 5.
Fortunately they have an Advisory Committee too and that must have some women on it right?  Nope.
Reminds me a bit of the QBio meeting from 2013 organized by many from UCSD which I wrote about last year: Q-Bio conference in Hawaii, bring your surfboard & your Y chromosome because they don't take a XX.  I note - this years Q-Bio meeting is much better.  But one can ask - does nobody at UCSD think about these issues when planning conferences and Advisory / Executive Committees.  I personally don't think one should choose women to just choose women.  But as with the Q-Bio meeting from last year, I think there are an enormous number of highly qualified women working on topics directly related to "Food and Fuel for the 21st Century" and thus I am both surprised and disturbed by the gender ratio of this meeting and this organization.


UPDATE 3/4 7:21 AM

It took me a bit but I found details on the 2013 symposium from the same group.  The web site for the 2013 meeting is not active as far as I can tell.  However it is available in the Internet Archive.  For example, here is a snapshot from June 1, 2013.  From that snapshot here are the listed speakers
  • David Kramer, Michigan State University
  • Susan Golden, University of California, San Diego
  • Julian Schroeder, University of California, San Diego
  • Stephen Mayfield, University of California, San Diego
  • Steven Briggs, University of California, San Diego
  • Matteo Pellegrini, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Donald Weeks, University of Nebraska--Lincoln
  • Michael Burkart, University of California, San Diego
  • Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, University of California, San Diego
  • Farzad Haerizadeh, Life Technologies
  • Ben Hueso, California State Assembly
  • Bill Gerwick, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
  • Eric Mathur, SG Biofuels
  • James Van Etten, University of Nebraska--Lincoln
  • Fred Tennant, Heliae
  • David Dunigan, University of Nebraska--Lincoln
  • Xuemei Bai, Cellana
  • George Oyler, University of Nebraska--Lincoln
  • Gerry Mackie, University of California, San Diego
  • Mark Hildebrand, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
  • Lawrence Johnson, Salim Group
  • Craig Behnke, Sapphire Energy
  • Rebecca White, Sapphire Energy

For a ratio of 20:3.