For many of us, the past year has been an endless stream of Zoom conferences and video chats. I’ve gone through periods of loving the easy accessibility of distant friends and family or conference seminars and meetings, and periods of being frustrated and impatient with the virtual format. It is much harder to be engaged when all you do involves staring at a screen and making sure your own little box on the screen doesn’t reveal your pajama pants or the pile of dishes behind you. Annoying or not, the constant video meetings are able to somewhat bridge the gap created by social distance.  This year of separation and solitude has made it evident that, as people, we need other people, and we are better together.
 
With the national events and my own personal growth over the past year, I decided to become a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I did so to broaden my knowledge of science and policy, to become a better citizen and to become a better steward of this biomedical doctoral degree I am pursuing. I received a constant stream of emails concerning their upcoming virtual conference, and I decided to take the plunge. $50 for access to an academic conference was hard to pass up. In the weeks and days leading up to the AAAS annual meeting, themed “Understanding Dynamic Ecosystems,” I scoured the program to plan out my days since I would be balancing this conference against my usual workload. There was a broad range of topics, including making cities greener, the impact of the prison system on the racial divide, fatherhood in monkeys, the impact of COVID-19 on corn fields and astronomy (which is above my paygrade), and the list goes on.  There were tons of seminars and workshops. They all overlapped, and it seemed all the most interesting ones happened in the same hour.
 
That’s one of the benefits of virtual conferences! The workshops were, naturally, live only, but the seminars were available for viewing for up to eight days so attendees could even sit in on simultaneous seminars. Some of the seminars, which were each hosted by four experts, had interesting titles but could not hold my attention. Instead of nodding off or trying to sneak out of a physical room, I could just exit the window and pull up another until I found one that really caught my attention. I feel like I really got the best bang for my buck by being able to drop in and out of conversations and find what was most stimulating to me. 
 
Let’s talk about some of what I learned! (Also, please forgive me! I took notes so I could refer to speakers by name and give references to their books and organizations, but I seemed to have misplaced them. We will continue in mystery and intrigue.)
 
One panel I viewed was discussing sustainable ways to make our cities greener. I believe that all four researchers were Londoners, but one was of Indian heritage, which will be important to the story. The native Londoners were philosophical in their discussion. Their lofty ideas centered around trees and greenery in city spaces and choosing to walk to work instead of commuting by car. Their discussion touched on tearing down vs renovating old buildings, and they found a way to skirt around the more practical questions asked. The conversation was interesting but only in a conceptual way; London was constructed when people did walk to work or to the store. I laughed at introducing the idea of a walking commute in Houston or Dallas, or any city in the American South. We have sprawled and stretched, and in the U.S., roads for automobiles are part of our infrastructure. Encouraging people to “go green and walk” will have little effect on creating sustainable cities. 
 
When the last panelist took his turn, the conversation truly became interesting. His research and passion is devoted to India. India’s population is booming and will continue to grow, and these people will continuously need housing and infrastructure. He was concerned with legislation about what constitutes appropriate and adequate housing, citing that many low-income families are barred from building their own homes due to building codes. However, in certain environments, using a material such as cow dung to build a home is not only appropriate, but durable and affordable. This would allow many more people to be housed than previously possible. He did not get much time to discuss these ideas in between the philosophical musings of the other panelists, but his thoughts were what stood out to me the most. 
 
This concept was so outside of my current realm of understanding or thinking about housing that I immediately began discussing it with my lab mates and our lab tech. I knew that collaboration was a good thing, but it was incredible to me to see how diverse collaboration on common problems leads to really innovative ideas. The approach that Londoners have to creating green cities is different than what we would need in the US, which is different than what people in India would need. But they can all lend perspective and innovation toward creating sustainable cities. The final panelist was vital to the depth and relevance of the conversation and made it a little easier to “understand diverse ecosystems.”
 
Another seminar I was able to attend was about “Silent Storytellers of the Past” and focused on using archaeology to gain a better understanding of individuals in history. The lead panelist in this case has spent her life researching a woman whose grave was found in a New England state and who was previously regarded as a “just a slave.” Through archaeology and much research, the panelist was able to identify the woman as a freedwoman who was an upstanding member of her community and who often gave to those less fortunate. While not wealthy, she was well-off and appeared to be a pillar of her community. So much of our nation’s history is stained and hidden by whitewashing and the passage of time, and I think it’s incredibly important to dig out the deeper truth and tell stories that haven’t been heard in a hundred years. 
 
The panel moved forward to discuss racial equity, discrimination that they, as Black academics and clergymen, have faced, and name several books and authors (most lost in my notes) we can read to better educate ourselves on other stories that have been silenced. I ordered The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, and Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet Washington. I know there is work to do and that biomedical research has had a dark history, and I don’t want to be ignorant any longer. As a community, it is important for us to hear the stories of the past that have been silenced so that we can move forward.
 
The last seminar I want to explore was by one woman who had a remarkable research career. Her main focus, and clear adoration, is trees. My memory is fuzzy on the specifics of her arboreal research, but it related to the biodiversity of the canopy when trees are separated from a forest by farming or deforestation. I believe it related to the number and type of birds that visit the solitary trees. Passion for trees and their biodiversity dripped from her speech and her enthusiasm was contagious. What’s memorable though is her approach to research. Over the years she had received grants and not received grants, as is the way of science. When she stopped receiving funding, she knew she had to take a different approach. She did what so many of us are hesitant to do and reached out across her university for collaboration, making it an open call. 
 
The call was answered by researchers who study traffic patterns, environmentalists, dance scientists and several others who were equally random and seemingly unrelated. They began to meet regularly, and she would explain her research with likely more vigor and passion than she did during this presentation. They began to find intersectionality in every single field. They drew connections with holes in her research and were able to provide insight based on their own disciplines’ theories. She even has a recently awarded grant in collaboration with the traffic patterns researcher. I was, and continue to be, astounded by this. She has collaborated with Mattel to make scientific research and arborist Barbies, leads an organization that combines theatre and science advocacy and paints her nails bright green so that when people comment on the color she can tell them about her research with trees. The woman is unstoppable in her passion and dedication to the importance of her research and has, in my estimation, pioneered new ways to collaborate to achieve her goals.
 
When I think of collaboration, I often think of people with many similarities conspiring to achieve a goal. There is agreement and similar ideas and viewpoints. I see now how counterintuitive this is. In order to collaborate to understand and serve a diverse ecosystem, the people doing the collaboration need to be diverse and have diverse, and even opposing, viewpoints. It’s incredibly important to ‘think outside the box’ to solve the problems we encounter and to not be afraid to reach across traditional boundaries, to reach out of the box, to gain new perspective.
 
While socially distant, attending the AAAS conference has opened the door for a deeper connection to the scientific community abroad and opened my eyes to the endless possibilities of connectivity and collaboration that internet access affords us. We are not solitary islands, self-sustaining and independent, but instead a vast and elaborate puzzle or tapestry: overlapping, woven together, and better together. 

Kalen Johnson is a doctoral student in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.