The 26th Ontario Biology Day (OBD) conference will be held at McMaster University on March 16 -17, 2013, and we welcome undergraduate students from Ontario universities to attend. The conference is an annual event that has been hosted by one of a dozen Ontario universities each year since its inaugural meeting in 1988.

OBD has become a long-standing tradition in Ontario, and its main focus is celebrating student accomplishments. OBD represents an opportunity for undergraduate students to communicate their findings to peers and mentors in a supportive environment and to share their enthusiasm for their research topic. Research presented always spans an impressive variety of topics, ranging in scale from molecular biology to ecological and evolutionary systems.

OBD brings together a very diverse group of developing scientists and provides an opportunity to network with prospective supervising professors (for graduate school and prospective academic careers) and learn about research and career opportunities. McMaster’s central location promises that OBD 2013 will be well attended. We hosted a record (more than 250 preregistered) undergraduate students at our previous meeting, 6 years ago, and we expect attendance to exceed that this year.

OBD 2013 will involve scientific and social activities planned over two days, including several concurrent sessions for oral presentations, a poster session, and a banquet. Students who choose to give a talk will be assigned to a timeslot with other students who have completed projects on similar topics and asked to speak for 10-12 minutes about their research with 3-5 minutes to answer questions, they will have the option of creating a power point presentation to assist in their talk. Students who choose to present a poster will create a 4 foot by 4 foot poster displaying their research methods and results and be present during the poster session early Saturday evening to answer questions from the other attendees about their research. In either case students will be asked to submit an abstract outlining their research for the conference proceedings.

Abstract book (PDF) 

Schedule Book (PDF)