SOT leadership, like many others, is deeply saddened by the devastating effects of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Our thoughts are with everyone impacted, especially those in the hardest-hit areas. We’ve been in touch with colleagues in Orlando and are relieved to hear that the Orange County Convention Center and surrounding area sustained minimal damage and operations have returned to normal. As a result, we plan to move forward with the SOT 64th Annual Meeting and ToxExpo as scheduled for March 16–20, 2025, in Orlando, Florida.
By presenting at the 2025 SOT Annual Meeting and ToxExpo, you will:
Poster Sessions occur Monday through Wednesday during the SOT Annual Meeting and ToxExpo.
Authors are assigned to a specific Poster Session, and on the day of their assigned session, their posters are displayed all day during ToxExpo hours (9:00 am–4:30 pm), allowing attendees to visit the posters at their convenience. Authors will attend their posters only during the assigned Poster Session time frame. Please consult the Poster Sessions FAQs for additional information.
By submitting an abstract and having that abstract accepted, the author is expected and obligated to pay the meeting registration fee and present the abstract during the assigned Poster or Platform Session. Acceptance notification and session timing/instructions will be sent by email in early January, before the early-bird registration deadline.
The Scientific Program Committee (SPC) reviews each abstract that is submitted and bases acceptance or rejection on specific criteria. Review this section carefully to better understand that criteria and to gain tips for successfully completing an abstract submission.
In previous years, the SPC noticed that most rejected abstracts fail to include at least one of four main elements. To help ensure that applicants are including the correct content in their abstracts—especially trainees submitting their first abstract—the SPC updated the application form by breaking the abstract entry into the four required pieces of information. Your abstract length in total—when combining the character count from each required element/box—should be 8,000 characters or less, not including spaces. Please note that your abstract title, the author block (author names, institutions, city, state, country), and the abstract section headers explained below are included in the 8,000 maximum character count.
Sample abstract that contains text appropriate for each section
The first few sentences of your abstract will go in the “Background and Purpose” box of the submission form and should describe why you embarked on this work and your overall purpose or objective.
The next few sentences of your abstract will go in the “Methods” box and will provide a description of how your research was done.
Arguably the most important portion of your abstract are the sentences conveying your results. This means data! If your study is not the kind to produce data, clearly summarize the results and findings. Do not include figures, tables, or chemical structures and avoid nonstandard acronyms.
In the situations of studies that do not describe laboratory or field experiments, such as reports on educational, ethics, legal, or social initiatives, authors should:
In addition, abstracts describing new initiatives or science policy in the regulatory community must clearly articulate the potential impact on the practice of toxicology and/or risk assessment. Care should be taken to clearly distinguish between statements based on documented facts versus opinions.
Literature surveys or reviews and background materials, a simple overview, or unstructured assessments of a topic, without novel advances in either approach or interpretation of a topic that leads to new conclusions, are not acceptable. However, systematic reviews and/or advances in systematic review methods are acceptable abstract submissions.
Abstract reviewers first ensure that a submitted abstract clearly describes the background and purpose of the work, the methods used, the results obtained, and the conclusions drawn. From there, the reviewer assesses the quality of this information, and abstracts can be rejected for one of these reasons:
Additionally, authors should consider the following when developing the abstract:
Authors are permitted as the presenting author on only one poster abstract for the meeting. There is no restriction on the number of co-authorships. The SOT Scientific Program Committee reserves the right to require consolidation of multiple abstracts submitted from a single study. Each abstract selected for the program must be presented by the presenting author.
SOT membership or sponsorship by an SOT member is required for all abstracts. If an SOT member is unavailable to sponsor the abstract and at least one author is a member of an organization approved for offering sponsorship, the author can indicate a sponsoring organization instead of an SOT member in the Abstract Submission System. By sponsoring the abstract, the sponsor acknowledges that the research has been done according to the SOT Code of Ethics. SOT member sponsorship is limited to Full and Associate members, who may sponsor an unlimited number of abstracts.
The approved sponsoring organizations are:
When abstract acceptances are sent in early January, the notifications contain the assigned Poster or Platform Session, including date and time, for each abstract. Once poster and platform presentations have been scheduled, the complexity of the program planning process prevents any changes in the type of session, time, or location of any presentation. There are no exceptions.
Written notification of withdrawal of an abstract must be received by SOT Headquarters by January 16 if the abstract cannot be included in the Annual Meeting materials. Any withdrawal requests made after January 16 will be honored by SOT Headquarters; however, based on the date of the request, the abstract may be included in the materials, and a “Withdrawn by Author” sign will appear on the poster board.
The one-time abstract submission fee is $70, payable by credit card during the abstract submission process. Undergraduate students should contact Betty Eidemiller to receive a promotional code to save $10. The late-breaking abstract submission fee is $95.
If you would like your abstract to be considered for an oral presentation in a Platform Session, on the abstract submission site, do not place a check that corresponds to the statement “Check here if you would like your abstract, if accepted, to NOT be considered for a Platform Session, which is a 15-minute oral slide presentation in a session room, as opposed to a poster presentation in the ToxExpo.”
There will be a late-breaking abstract submission period December 12, 2024–January 20, 2025. The late-breaking abstract submission fee is $95.
An important criterion for the late-breaking submission period is that the research must be new and of sufficient scientific importance to merit special consideration after the standard abstract deadline. Abstracts should describe high-impact, original research that could not be completed before the original deadline. All late-breaking abstracts will be presented during Poster Sessions on Thursday morning.
If none of the authors on your abstract is an SOT member, sponsorship by a Full or Associate member is required. By sponsoring the abstract, the sponsor acknowledges that the research has been completed in adherence with the SOT Code of Ethics. If there is no Full or Associate SOT member available, if at least one author is a member of an approved sponsoring organization, you may indicate that in the Abstract Submission System. A full list of approved sponsoring organizations can be found the “Authorship and Sponsorship” section on this web page.
At this time, SOT can only accept payment by credit card. Accepted credit cards include Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express.
A “Print Receipt” option will appear in the Abstract Submission System once the abstract fee payment has been approved. Receipts also are emailed to the submitting author. Check your Junk or Spam folder if you do not receive an emailed receipt within 30 minutes of submitting an abstract.
Refunds are not offered for any abstracts that have been submitted for the SOT Annual Meeting. The submission fee covers the costs associated with processing and reviewing the abstracts.
The system has a 120-minute time-out feature. After 120 minutes of inactivity, the system will automatically log you out. If this happens, your entries up to that point WILL BE SAVED, and you will be returned to the place where you left off when you log back in. If you get a “Page Cannot Be Displayed” error, you have probably been logged out.
This depends on your browser. For most browsers, you may copy and paste your full title and abstract into the appropriate fields in the abstract system from an MS Word document, and the special characters will be preserved in the abstract system. However, if there is hidden coding embedded in the document you are copying from, the special characters may be replaced with a question mark or other symbols when the abstract is loaded into the Abstract Submission System. Be sure to review the summary page of your abstract submission in the system and check the special characters to make sure they are intact.
If you cannot remove the hidden coding, copy and paste your text to a Notepad document and then copy the text from Notepad to the abstract box in the submission site. Notepad will remove any hidden coding from the text.
If you have any conflicts of interest that you need to disclose, please indicate them in the appropriate step in the submission site. If your abstract is accepted, you must include those conflicts on a disclosure slide in your platform presentation or make the disclosure on your poster.
The submission site does not recognize your SOT membership login information and requires a separate login. However, when you create your Abstract Submission System login, you may use your SOT credentials.
Upon starting the process to submit an abstract, you will be automatically assigned a control ID number. Once you have completed the abstract submission process, please keep a copy of the submission confirmation for your records, including your control ID number. You will need your control ID number to communicate with SOT Headquarters and/or the Tech Support team about a specific abstract.
No. Presenting authors will attend their posters during their assigned Poster Session time frame, but the poster will remain displayed during ToxExpo hours.
The presenting authors are encouraged to include an email address or other contact information on their poster so attendees who view the poster when the author is not in attendance can contact the authors with questions or other information. Uploading an ePoster provides additional viewing opportunities for attendees.
Poster Sessions and their corresponding time blocks are defined by topic (e.g., neurotoxicology, metals) so that attendees interested in that topic have access to all authors at the same time. In addition, the Scientific Program Committee will make every effort to ensure that no Scientific Sessions, including Platform Sessions, related to a specific topic occur during the same time period as the Poster Session for that topic.
SOT understands that sudden scheduling conflicts can arise. All presenting authors are encouraged to include an email address or other contact information on their poster so attendees who view the poster when the author is not in attendance can contact the authors with questions or other information. Presenting authors also are highly encouraged to upload an ePoster to provide additional viewing opportunities for attendees.
Poster Sessions and their corresponding time blocks are defined by topic (e.g., neurotoxicology, metals) so that attendees interested in that topic have access to all authors at the same time. In addition, considerable effort is made to group similar topic Poster Sessions together in the same color-coded area in the ToxExpo Exhibit Hall. Finally, the Scientific Program Committee makes every effort to ensure that no Scientific Sessions, including Platform Sessions, related to a specific topic occur during the same time period as the Poster Session(s) for that topic.
SOT policy is to not allow any photography of posters unless permission is expressed by the author. SOT staff and security staff will be enforcing the “no photography” policy on-site to curtail concerns about the all-day display format. “No Photography” signs will be displayed on all poster boards. Attendees who violate the no photography policy risk ejection from the Annual Meeting.
On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, authors may enter the ToxExpo Exhibit Hall as early as 7:30 am to mount their posters. Poster presenters will be admitted into the ToxExpo Exhibit Hall provided they have (1) an Annual Meeting badge and (2) are carrying a poster or have a receipt to pick up a poster ordered from Shepard—a badge alone will not allow entry into the ToxExpo Exhibit Hall before 9:00 am.
Authors are asked to remain with their posters or leave the Exhibit Hall after their posters are mounted. Authors wandering the Exhibit Hall prior to 9:00 am will be asked to leave by security.
Poster “tear-down” will occur between 4:15 pm and 4:30 pm Monday through Wednesday.
Poster presenters should remove their posters by 4:30 pm each day. Posters left on boards after 4:30 pm on Monday and Tuesday will be removed and placed on retrieval tables located throughout the ToxExpo.
ToxExpo closes on Wednesday at 4:30 pm. Remaining posters will be gathered and placed on retrieval tables in the Late-Breaking Poster Session room on Thursday morning. Any posters unclaimed by 11:00 am on Thursday will be destroyed.
Authors are required to have their poster mounted on the board for the full duration of the ToxExpo hours (9:00 am–4:30 pm). Poster Session Chairs will be assigned to assist authors during the Poster Sessions, to note any empty boards, and to check compliance with the all-day poster display requirement.
It is very common for Poster Session Chairs to present a poster in the session that they are chairing. If you are Chair in a Poster Session you are presenting in, you may leave your poster a few times during the Poster Session time to fulfill your Chair duties.
Not all poster board clusters on the ToxExpo floor contain the same number of boards, and not all Poster Sessions contain the same number of posters. Therefore, ensuring that all Poster Sessions begin and end in the same poster board cluster is extremely difficult.
To resolve this issue, the SOT Scientific Program Committee would need to set a minimum and maximum number of poster abstracts accepted per Poster Session so the sessions would contain an equal number of boards within the same cluster, which would limit the number of poster abstracts accepted. The current policy is to assign no more than 40 posters to a Poster Session, while the minimum is five posters for a Poster Session.
Signs are used throughout the poster board areas to help attendees and poster presenters locate sessions and specific poster presentations.
Poster boards are strategically placed throughout the ToxExpo Exhibit Hall to optimize the experience of attendees and exhibitors by creating an ease of movement throughout the hall.
