Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) educational programs provided a lifeline to scientists, teachers, and students during the pandemic. In February 2020 the DNA Learning Center switched from live to virtual experiences, creating 286 new videos that were viewed over 3.7 million times, and attracted nearly 19,000 new subscribers to the DNALC Live YouTube channel. They also hosted virtual field trips, science camps, museum tours, lectures, teacher workshops, and student research symposiums, with over 22,285 participants.
Successes with virtual experiences may have changed the way information is exchanged forever: hybrid meetings, courses, and field trips may become the norm. Here are some of our staff’s innovations and accomplishments from March 2020 to the reopening of the campus to visitors in March 2022:
- CSHL fostered unprecedented global collaboration and communication through its open-access preprint servers, medRxiv and bioRxiv, disseminating over 22,000 COVID-19 preprints.
- The Meetings & Courses Program connected 15,000 participants per year at 60 virtual conferences, 12 virtual courses, and 6 other hybrid experiences.
- The CSHL Library & Archives disseminated scientific lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS epidemic in an annotated archive of a conference they had held on the topic in 2016. The archive contains 1,291 cross-indexed terms and about 900 citations culled from 24 hours of videotaped lectures.
- The School of Biological Sciences found a way to welcome full, in-person classes of eight to nine Ph.D. students to campus each year, housing them together and safely educating them as a small community of learners.
Want to know more?
See an up-to-date collection of all the Laboratory’s COVID-19–related stories.
Written by: Eliene Augenbraun, Creative Director | publicaffairs@cshl.edu | 516-367-8455