Silver Spring, Maryland, March 5, 2020

This one was a bit different. I wasn't just presenting, I was one of the main event coordinators for the entire public workshop, Medical Extended Reality: Toward Best Evaluation Practices for Virtual and Augmented Reality in Medicine, hosted at the FDA White Oak campus. The goal of the day was to bring together industry, academia, and government to discuss evaluation techniques for XR hardware and software, identify critical gaps in the field, and start moving toward shared standards for medical XR devices. Alongside the poster, I handled most of the admin work: putting together the program brochure (fully designed, page by page, by me), acting as the main point of contact for all the speakers, collecting their headshots and bios, maintaining the event website, and managing guest registration.

Since this was an FDA-hosted event, our "poster session" worked a little differently than a typical conference; it was meant to give outside attendees a window into the regulatory research happening inside our office. The poster session was to be filled by mine only, so I had to thoroughly prepare an interactive talk with the audience, knowing they'd all be focused on me for the entire session. It summarized all of the AR/VR/XR research going on across our group, co-authored with Ryan Beams, Ellenor Brown, Wei-Chung Cheng, Kyoko Fujimoto, Janell Joyner, Kimberly Kontson, Paul Lemaillet, Trent Robertson, and Aldo Badano. Instead of a printed board, it was displayed across a 4x4 wall of TV monitors. Much larger than the biggest poster I've ever printed!

In this photo I'm standing next to Ed Margerrison, Ph.D., Director of the Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories (OSEL), who has always been incredibly supportive of our MXR group's work. The workshop itself was a great success- I got to meet a wide range of professionals from across the industry who were curious about the FDA's perspective on this field, and it was a great chance to learn from each other.

Here are some snippets from my poster presentation

#extendedreality #posterpresentation #fdaworkshop #eventplanning