Call for Abstracts – Sustainable Labs Canada

Download the Call for Abstracts form

Sustainable Labs Canada (SLCan) and Conference Organizing Committee invite you to submit presentations on your involvement, your expertise and the current and future challenges you anticipate with respect to the development and management of laboratories.

Abstracts are encouraged in, but not limited to the following topics:

Design & Engineering – For the People and of the People – Case Studies and Sharing Applications

• Laboratories and indoor air quality post pandemic
• Recruitment and Retention – How work from home has affected effective laboratory design
• The built environment and resilience of materials
• Lessons learned in lab design from the pandemic
• Energy modeling considerations in a post-pandemic world
• Design challenges associated with pathogen spread in the lab environment
• Designing laboratories that will last. What is a resilient lab of the future?

Operations and Facilities Management

• Design & operations – How they play a role in a building’s climate, energy and health resilience
• Net zero solutions and carbon neutrality and how these affect resilience of labs
• Climate and resiliency – how will we adapt

Products, Technology and Energy Management

• Measuring, Certifying and Monitoring features of the built environment
• To “Serve and Protect” – Systems and features that have been found to support increased IAQ in laboratories
• Innovative systems that support resilience
• Commissioning strategies that can affect resilience in a lab’s life cycle
• Smart Building Technologies supporting resilience
• Products that define resilience
• Performance Improvements in the post-pandemic environment

ABSTRACTS

Abstracts should be submitted for consideration as oral presentations in a virtual environment. Oral presentations are to be 45 minutes in length. Abstracts should be no more than 500 words and must include biographies for all presenters. The abstracts may be submitted in English or French and must be submitted using the form to info@slcan.ca. Note that all sections of the form must be completed to be considered. The abstract submission deadline is August 5, 2021.

Special attention will be given to abstracts that:
• Focus on new developments and technologies;
• Evaluate a completed project's performance by presenting documented results over a period of time; and,
• Are presented by the facility owner.

OFFICIAL LANGUAGES

Initial abstracts may be submitted in English or French. All final abstracts and presentations crediting federal government employee authors must be submitted in English and French. Any organizations with translation capabilities are encouraged to provide their abstracts and presentations in English and French. The translation may follow the revised final version.

FINAL PRESENTATIONS

PowerPoint (PPT) presentations must be submitted for review by subject experts. Authors of accepted presentations must revise their PPT presentations as required by the reviewers. Revised PPTs are to be submitted by e-mail. The presentations will be made available on the SLCan website (www.slcan.ca) following the Conference in the members only section.

TIPS FOR PRESENTERS (selected abstracts)

• Communicate sustainability in a way that makes it relevant and useful to the particular audience you are speaking to.
• Provide a balance between negative and positive with a focus on the positive.
• Provide a balance between theory, examples and stories, with a focus on the stories.
• Empower the audience with information that will enable them to move forward to do something rather than get frustrated.
• Communicate all sides of the story as effectively as possible.
• Base the presentation on actual experience (own or that of others), not on speculation and wishful thinking.
• Address challenges and trade-offs around sustainability.
• Be engaging and interactive, breaking conventions in presentation style as sustainability requires breaking conventions in the “real world”.

Abstract Deadline – August 5, 2021
Author Notification – August 19, 2021
Revised/Translated Abstract Due – August 26, 2021
Draft PPT Due – September 15, 2021
Final (Revised) PPT Due – October 1, 2021
Translated PPT Due – October 11, 2021