IBioIC's 9th Annual Conference brings the IB community together
IBioIC’s 9th Annual Conference welcomed around 400 delegates to Glasgow on 15 and 16 March for a resoundingly successful event that included hugely popular plenary talks from world champion cyclist and EoS Advisory partner Mark Beaumont and USDA Administrator Dr Karama Neal, bustling exhibition area, a programme of fringe events, poster competition, informal and structured networking opportunities and the ever-popular conference dinner, which this year took place at Platform, in Glasgow’s iconic underground arches.
The theme of this year’s conference was Resilience and the Bioeconomy, and sessions focused in on key areas where biotechnology can support and enable resilience across the bioeconomy, and also looked at building resilience into start up and SME biotech companies as they take their scale up journeys.
This year’s conference dinner was a much more informal affair with a range of global street foods served buffet-style which promoted a relaxed atmosphere and encouraged attendees to circulate and network widely. Our chosen venue, Platform, has a collection agreement with packaging supplier Vegware who retrieve and compost all single-use packaging. In a few short weeks, all singe use packaging from the conference dinner will be fertilising farms in the west of Scotland.
We were delighted to have Johnson Matthey as our dinner sponsor this year, and guests heard from them before this year’s Catherine Baker Memorial Award winners were announced.
Eve Hamilton
Jacob Wiseman
Ryan Treadwell
Sustainability has become a key issue in recent years. IBioIC has worked closely with events managers Lux Events, and with the Strathclyde sustainability team, to implement tools to measure and analyse carbon data and to identify carbon savings. We also implemented various strategies, such as locally-sourced food, the use of a conference app to reduce paper use, promoting public transport, and encouraging exhibitors not to bring giveaways, to reduce our carbon footprint.
A powerful statistic that emerged is that air travel was the biggest contributor to the travel carbon footprint with 24 people accounting for 47% of the travel emissions. Six of these journeys were from abroad, but the majority (18) were from within the UK.
“The conference provided me with a platform to showcase our efforts and collaborate with other like-minded individual from IB space ”
“IBioIC Conference let us meet the people we needed to meet and created an environment where that meeting was the best it could possibly be. Thank you.”
“Fantastic opportunity to strengthen existing relationships and develop new connections across a varied range of sectors”
“The conference has become our ‘go-to’ meeting in the events calendar as the best place by far to network with like-minded companies and colleagues to push forward the sustainability agenda”