With the rise of the pandemic and considerations for remote work, accessibility and virtual events, it was incumbent upon us to find a workable solution for our researchers so that they were able to share their work, disseminate their findings to peers, find collaborators and have some version of a space to network with other researchers as they had done previously at in-person events.

From the beginning days of the pandemic, it was essential that we create something that could be accessible and asynchronous, allowing us a greater flexibility in terms of the presentation of the content. These events contained a live, virtual element, combined with an archival gallery of posters, serving as the virtual poster hall. We explored a number of different options, including using a virtual conference space through a vendor, but ultimately found that the most effective and successful ways of creating a poster session in the virtual space was to build a website dedicated to our poster sessions across research disciplines.

Formally launched in December 2020, with a poster session for the Department of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the virtual poster site has continued to serve as a platform for collaboration and sharing for the research community. This chart shows how often and how many posters were added to the site over the past two years, with close to a thousand posters now available on the site as of November 2023.