Schrödinger scientists travel to over 100 conferences a year all across the world to present on topics ranging from free energy perturbation to machine-learning, polymer development, vaccine design, education and careers in science, among many others. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and conferences canceled one after the other, we were left with dozens of scientists who had prepared presentations that apparently no longer had an audience.

We decided to move our conference presentations online and launched The Schrödinger Summer of Science Series as a way to maintain our connection with our scientific user community virtually. While nothing can replace meeting with people in person, what we’ve learned about the advantages of online presentations has helped develop our perspective on what we can offer not only now, but well beyond the course of this pandemic. Now, twelve weeks into the series, we’ve discovered that the connections that have been so crucial at conferences can continue and thrive. Here are a few of the key points.

Reaching a Global Audience

On-site conferences are limited to their location. With our Summer of Science programming, we’ve been able to reach far more people than we ever could have engaged at a physical conference. Streaming our presentations on-demand meant that anyone, anywhere could attend the presentations on their own schedules. More than 4,000 people have signed up for our series of free webinars organized into three tracks—small molecule drug discovery, materials science, and biologics. We have had attendees from more than 100 countries and all 50 U.S. states. We continue to add new content, including from guest speakers, and are working on plans to host an entire session from a postponed conference, scheduled for the Fall.

Presentations Live On Indefinitely

While the presentations are first made public at pre-set times, once they’re online, they remain online, so anyone who’s interested can view them at their leisure. That ability to re-watch makes the material a lot easier to digest than it would be at an in-person conference where you’re racing from one session to another. Once the series is complete, the presentations will be stored in the training section of our website where they can be accessed in the future as a growing resource for our user communities. 

Expert Panel Discussions

When we found that live Q&A sessions but found that this format clashed with the on-demand accessibility of the presentations. The live sessions  presented obvious time zone challenges too, and we found participation was lower than that of the talks. We switched to panel presentations such as “Working Remotely as a Scientist,” which could be pre-recorded and posted to watch anytime to be consistent with the presentations. Not only was that a valuable resource for the audience, but our presenters enjoyed the opportunity to discuss their favorite topics with their colleagues.

Questions Can Be Answered Personally

Viewers are invited to ask questions through the website. The questions go to the presenter, who can respond directly to the attendee. While the personal connection of meeting face-to-face at a conference is lost, the ability to save the answers to refer back to is an unexpected advantage. Later on, we plan to post both questions and answers online for others to reference as well, along with the presentations themselves.

Online Learning Can Continue

Alongside the launch of the Summer of Science series, we have also seen a spike in interest in the Schrödinger Online Course: “An Introduction to Molecular Modeling in Drug Discovery”—a 20-hour online class, launched in November last year. In the first quarter of this year the course was already proving extremely popular, running close to capacity. In the second quarter of the year, registrations increased four-fold, and we had to increase our infrastructure to meet the demand. This increased rate continues as scientists continue to work from home.

Reflecting on the overall experience, many of the viewers said the webinars exceeded their expectations. Both customers and presenters mentioned they hope we continue to record these presentations and post them online even after the pandemic eases and we can return to face-to-face conferences. One medicinal chemist mentioned,“This is exactly what we need as we are locked out of the lab!”

We look forward to experimenting with information sharing in more formats going forward. In the meantime, enjoy the continuing Summer of Science!

We would love to hear your thoughts about the Summer of Science series! What have you enjoyed and what would you like to see done differently? Fill out this short survey to let us know. 

About the author:

Robert joined Schrödinger in 2009, and is responsible for advancing Schrödinger’s computational science platform. He also leads the computational chemistry team within Schrödinger’s drug discovery group. Robert obtained his PhD from Columbia University, where he was awarded NSF and DHS research fellowships. His thesis work with Professor Richard Friesner involved developing methods to quantify the role of solvent in protein-ligand binding. Robert has co-authored multiple patent applications, and continues to publish extensively on a wide variety of topics in computational chemistry.