On February 22, 2023 at the Cambridge Genomics Meetup, we held our own personal best of 130 people attending (and 203 registered) at one of our events. The secret for such an amazing turnout is probably a mixture of factors:
- Word of mouth seems to have spread from the previous event we organised with Genomics England.
- We count on an amazing marketing team from Genomics England that supported and spread the word about the event.
- Because of 2., we also noted that membership growth for the Cambridge Genomics Meetup has increased by 200 people in the last 3 months. This means many new people have joined, reaching 800 members.
- The location is essential. There are very few places in the world where you would have such a critical mass of highly tech-inclined genomics people. Cambridge, with its great concentration of research, institutions and businesses, provides the right ecosystem for that.
- Finally, the time seems ripe for doing genomics in the UK. With international initiatives such as Our Future Health, the 100,000 Newborn Genomes Programme and the UK Biobank, the field seems to be exploding and hence lots of new people interested in the topic.
Cambridge Genomics Meetup started in 2018 just before the pandemic as a way to bring together academics, scientists, industry, government and entrepreneurs in the broader field of genomics from around the Cambridge region and beyond.
Early on it was noted that around the rich ecosystem of Cambridge, communication among different organisations could be challenging, particularly in order to develop collaborations, partnerships or simply getting hired in a different institution. The role of the Cambridge Genomics Meetup is to bridge this inter-institutional gap in order to develop a local sense of a wider community and networking opportunities for collaboration in genomics.
We were also very fortunate to have Amazon Web Services sponsor for this exciting event. It is an honour and privilege to share the stage this evening with a panel of distinguished speakers from Genomics England who talked about bioinformatics challenges in clinical genomics.
