Project Summary/Abstract UC Berkeley and the Doudna Lab are incredibly fortunate this year to organize the annual CEGS conference. The event falls at a time when we will be commemorating the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Human Genome Project and the publication of the NHGRI's new strategic plan. We think that this is an opportunity to strengthen the Program and NHGRI's global outreach and impact as we embark on a new era of science and technology. Indeed, as new fields emerge, the CEGS Program, and its researchers, will continue to evolve and create greater impact in the world. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic brought great uncertainty among scientists and people across the world. While countries locked down, we saw many of our colleagues and fellow researchers starting collaborating and fiercely contributing to the growing issue. With no fewer than 400 participants this year, the CEGS conference is consequently an opportunity for true engagement at such a pivotal and momentous time. We do not want this conference to be a sequence of scientific reports and presentations. We want this conference to reflect the new NHGRI's strategic vision. We want to challenge our audience and engage them into conversations around ethics, technology, and diversity. Conversations that set a precedent not only for our research scope but for how we choose to engage with science at a societal level. There has never been a better time to encourage and facilitate these conversations. We have the great honor of doing so with some of the greatest minds in science and we want to take full advantage of this and provide all the necessary tools to create collaboration opportunities and set the stage for considerable scientific progress. In fact, it has been proven that projects centered in collaboration among researchers from different institutions are more frequently cited and novel. We think that the shelter-in-place and the mandate to make the CEGS conference “go virtual” gives us an opportunity to envision a different kind of conference — a conference that zeroes in on what motivates scientists to go to conferences in the first place: to share ideas, to forge collaborations, and to make connections. New formats and tools are now available so that researchers from all sorts of backgrounds and at a variety of career stages can interact, connect, and network. Given this, we can provide a space for conversation and innovation that would not otherwise be possible or likely in general assembly. This is why we favor a more reliable infrastructure accessible to all with a networking friendly user interface that is easy to navigate. We truly believe that the perceived “limitations” of a virtual meeting can actually put us at a great advantage. We are going to enable the technology afforded to us to realize these advantages. Our goal is to create real collaboration across disciplines, specialties, and levels of leadership. The event will be planned and executed with this ...