General information and slide preparation:

• These workshops are essentially short courses. So your talks and slides should be prepared to include fundamentals and more details, followed by applications and case studies.
• The attendees are generally diverse and mostly from local biotech companies. Therefore, it is important to start from some fundamentals at the beginning of the workshop.  The attendance is generally 100 – 150.
• Slides should be for a short course, not for a seminar have reasonable amounts of details so that the attendees can go back home to study the slides if they want.  Please try to avoid “seminar slides” which often have just a figure and no words. It is best to have the figure plus a few bullet points to summarize the data or the take-home message.  Keep in mind that attendees will use the handouts as a take-home reference.
• Use colors and graphics prudently, for good presentation and printing.  If you extract texts or figures from a PDF document using the snapshot tool, in order to ensure good resolution, you need to first expand the PDF view to ~200%, then use the snapshot tool (the camera icon) to copy.
• The overall structure and the flow of topics are very important.  Upfront, the lead speaker needs to have a slide to show the workshop objective and bullet-point agenda / outline of the entire workshop, while the subsequent speakers should also do so for his/her section.
• We prefer ~1.5 min/slide, to allow adequate explanation to a diverse audience.  You can add useful slides into an Appendix section.  An afternoon workshop typically has ~225 min net lecture time, while a full day workshop has ~375 min.
• First draft due 3 weeks before the date for organizers’ feedbacks. The final draft is due 10 days before the date to allow enough time for the organizers to submit for handout printing.
• If your file is >10 MB, please let the organizers know so that we can provide you the information how to transmit the file to the organizers.

Meeting logistics:

• If an afternoon workshop/forum, the meeting starts at 12:45pm (8:45am if a full day), with meeting intro and major sponsor’s presentation first.  The workshop’s scientific session starts promptly at 1:00pm (9:00am if a full day) and typically lasts through ~5:15pm.
• For the morning session, there’s typically one 15 min break starting at ~ 10:30am, while the afternoon session typically has two short breaks (10-15 min each), at ~2:15pm and 3:45pm.
• Our meetings typically are held at Crowne Plaza Foster City (1221 Chess Dr., Foster City, CA 94404), which is ~15 min south of SFO in normal traffic and the taxi fare is ~$30-35.  Keep all receipts and email the organizer the pdf files of the receipts for reimbursement after returning home. 
• Workshop speakers are also encouraged to stay for the traditional post-workshop wrap-up dinner (typically 5:45-7:30pm).