The 68th ASH Annual Meeting runs December 12–15, 2026 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.
This is a practical guide to the official poster and presentation rules for the American Society of Hematology's 68th Annual Meeting: the poster size and format, the poster upload and its virtual component, oral slides and the official PowerPoint template, the hematology figures a poster or slide needs, where accepted abstracts are published in Blood, and the disclosure, embargo, and AI policy every presenter must follow. Every date and specification below links to official ASH materials.
Transparency note: Illustrations in this article were generated with SciFig AI and reviewed by the author for scientific accuracy. Factual claims about dates and specifications link to official ASH materials.
1. ASH 2026 at a Glance: Dates, Venue & Key Deadlines
The 68th ASH Annual Meeting & Exposition runs December 12–15, 2026 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, Louisiana (Central Time), as a hybrid meeting, and the regular abstract submission deadline is August 4, 2026 (11:59 p.m. Pacific). ASH draws more than 30,000 attendees and over 5,000 abstracts (the meeting hashtag is #ASH26), and each abstract carries a $95 handling fee. One rule shapes everyone's planning: the presenting author must attend in person in New Orleans — virtual registrants can watch but cannot present. Acceptance notifications are sent in the fall; ASH states that "in October, presenters will be contacted" to begin uploading slides, but the exact 2026 notification date is not published as of July 21, 2026, so confirm it on the official presenter resources.
Here is the ASH 2026 timeline that matters for a poster or presentation, drawn from the official ASH Annual Meeting page and Key Dates and the ASH call for abstracts. For the session-by-session schedule, ASH posts its preliminary program on the annual meeting site.
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| July 22, 2026 | ASH member registration opens |
| August 4, 2026 | Regular abstract submission deadline (11:59 p.m. PT); $95 handling fee per abstract |
| August 12, 2026 | Non-member, group, exhibitor, and media registration opens |
| October 2026 | Acceptance notifications sent; presenters contacted to upload slides (exact 2026 date not published as of July 21, 2026) |
| Fall 2026 | Poster and 5-minute video upload deadline (exact date to be confirmed on official presenter resources) |
| December 12–15, 2026 | 68th ASH Annual Meeting & Exposition, New Orleans |
A registration note: submitting an abstract does not register you for the meeting, and the presenting author must be there in person, so map your ASH 2026 program and travel once your presentation is confirmed.
2. ASH 2026 Poster Size, Format & Guidelines
ASH provides a poster board of roughly 4 ft tall × 6 ft wide in landscape (horizontal) orientation for each ASH 2026 poster, and — unlike most meetings — ASH prints and hangs your poster for you if you upload it by the deadline. Each board is numbered, and your poster is mounted for you when you meet the upload cutoff; if you miss it, you print and bring your own. ASH's poster guidelines also ask you to keep the title large and legible, avoid mounting the sheet on a heavy backing board, and steer clear of any commercial or product-promotional poster. One honest caveat on ASH 2026 poster size: the board dimensions above reflect ASH's general (recent-year) specification, and the exact 2026 board size should be confirmed on the official presenter resources before you finalize your ASH poster dimensions and format.
These ASH 2026 poster format rules come from the official ASH meeting and presenter resources. A few points shape how you build the sheet:
- Landscape, roughly 4 × 6 ft — design to this wide ratio from the start; a portrait layout wastes a landscape board.
- ASH prints and hangs it if you upload on time — the single most important deadline for a poster presenter is the upload cutoff, not travel day.
- Show your poster number — accepted abstracts and their poster boards are numbered, so place your number clearly on the sheet.
- No commercial or product posters — ASH prohibits promotional posters; keep the sheet scientific.
The hematology figures on an ASH poster — a CAR-T mechanism, a hematopoietic differentiation tree, a signaling pathway — are the slowest part of that layout to build. You can draw and refine publication-grade versions online and drop them straight into your PowerPoint composition.
Need a hero figure for your ASH poster?
Start from a CAR-T mechanism, hematopoiesis tree, or pathway visual, then edit every element before you open PowerPoint.
Explore the Tool3. ASH 2026 Poster Upload & Virtual Component: Static Image + 5-Minute Video
Every ASH 2026 poster presenter uploads two things through Freeman's Orchestrate platform: a static poster image and a 5-minute PowerPoint video narration, which together form the meeting's on-demand virtual component. The static image is what ASH prints and hangs on your board, and both the image and the short narrated video are what remote and on-demand attendees view online. This makes the ASH poster upload the pivot of your whole schedule: hit it and ASH handles printing; miss it and you lose the printed board and the virtual slot.
The upload requirements live in the official ASH presenter resources, with the exact file specifications provided inside each presenter's Orchestrate account. Because the ASH poster video and static image are viewed on screens as well as printed, crisp vector-style figures read far better than photographed or low-resolution graphics — a mechanism diagram exported cleanly stays legible when a delegate zooms in on a laptop. One honesty note: the exact fall upload deadline is not yet finalized in the public presenter materials as of July 21, 2026 (the resources page currently shows more than one candidate date), so confirm the definitive poster and video upload deadline on the official ASH presenter resources.
4. ASH 2026 Oral Presentation: Slides, PowerPoint Template & Speaker Ready Room
If your abstract is selected for an ASH 2026 oral presentation, you must present live and in person in New Orleans — ASH does not accept pre-recorded oral talks — and you upload your slides through Orchestrate, then check them in the on-site Speaker Ready Room. ASH also publishes an official PowerPoint Template for Presenters and an Abstract Poster Template (.pptx) that you can download from the ASH presenter resources page; use the official ASH slide template and poster template as your starting frame rather than rebuilding one. As with the poster upload, ASH says slide instructions are provided in October, so plan for a fall preparation window.
For an ASH 2026 presentation, download the official templates from the ASH presenter resources (ASH holds the copyright, so link to and download the current file rather than reusing an old copy). One field is genuinely open: the exact oral time limits per session type are not published as of July 21, 2026 — ASH states the instructions arrive in October — so confirm your ASH oral presentation length on the official presenter resources instead of assuming a slot. What does not change is the visual demand: a short oral slot leaves room for only a handful of slides, so nearly every ASH presentation slide needs one clear figure — a mechanism schematic, a differentiation tree, a pathway — doing the explaining rather than a wall of text.
5. What Figures Do You Need? Poster & Slides
ASH abstracts are text only — no figures or tables may be included in an ASH abstract submission — so every scientific figure you prepare belongs on your poster or in your oral slides, not in the abstract. This is a meaningful difference from meetings that allow an abstract figure: at ASH, your figures do their work in exactly two places, the printed poster and the oral presentation. The exact mix depends on your track (cell therapy, myeloid or lymphoid malignancy, hemostasis, benign hematology, and so on), but a few hematology figure jobs recur across the meeting.
On your poster, the recurring hematology figure types are:
- CAR-T / cell-therapy mechanism — the CAR construct, antigen recognition, and tumor-cell killing. Often the figure that decides whether a busy delegate stops.
- Hematopoiesis and lineage differentiation — the hematopoietic stem cell branching into correctly ordered myeloid and lymphoid lineages, the backdrop for much of the meeting's science.
- Signaling or oncogenic pathway — the specific cascade behind your data (for example a BCR-ABL / Philadelphia-chromosome axis), drawn with publication-grade clarity.
On your slides, an oral presenter needs one clean figure per slide — usually the single mechanism or pathway figure that carries the talk, since your slot is short.
Because none of these figures can live in the abstract, the poster and the oral deck are where they earn their keep. Each of them historically takes hours in a vector editor. You can draw them from a structured text prompt or turn your accepted abstract PDF into a starter figure instead, then edit and export.
Turn your abstract into a CAR-T or pathway diagram
Paste your study mechanism and build a clean, editable hematology figure for your poster and slides.
Try Free6. Designing a Winning Hematology Poster: Accuracy the Way ASH Requires It
A winning ASH poster passes two tests: it is grasped in three seconds by a delegate walking past, and it is scientifically exact enough to survive scrutiny from a hematologist standing in front of it. The strongest layouts are built around one dominant "hero" figure — usually the CAR-T mechanism or the pathway central to your data with the key result beside it — and everything else supports it. A roughly 4 × 6 ft landscape board with one strong, correct figure beats a dense grid of small panels every time.
The second test is where scientific figures live or die — and where general-purpose AI image generators fall short. A tool like Nano Banana Pro or GPT Image can produce something that looks about 99% right, but on a scientific figure 99% right is effectively 0% right: a scrambled CAR domain order, a myeloid lineage drawn where a lymphoid one belongs, a mislabeled Philadelphia chromosome, or perforin/granzyme arrows pointing the wrong way turns a compelling poster into one that misleads a reviewer. A flat, raster AI image also gives you no way to fix that last one percent — there are no elements to select and correct.
This is where a tool like SciFig fits ASH's rules, and it is worth being precise about how. ASH's abstract policy states that "generation of original text, slides, and posters using AI tools is prohibited." SciFig is not used that way here: you use it the way you would use vector illustration software such as Adobe Illustrator — you construct and edit the figure element by element, you review it against the biology you know, and you remain the author responsible for its scientific accuracy. Every figure is a fully editable SVG (and PPTX) whose arrows, labels, receptors, and cells you correct individually, so you (the person who actually knows the hematology) close the gap to 100% and sign off. That author-in-the-loop, element-level control is what keeps the work inside ASH's authorship expectations — and you should still follow ASH's disclosure and authorship rules for any tool you use. The hematology figures that reward this care are exactly the ones reviewers scrutinize:
- CAR-T construct — get the domain order right (scFv, hinge, transmembrane, costimulatory, CD3ζ); a garbled construct is the first thing a cell-therapy reviewer notices.
- Hematopoiesis and lineage — keep the myeloid and lymphoid branches distinct and correctly ordered rather than inventing cell types or hierarchies that do not exist.
- Pathway direction — draw BCR-ABL / Philadelphia-chromosome and cytolytic (perforin/granzyme) steps in the correct order and direction, not reversed.
Whether your ASH 2026 poster earns its attention comes down to whether these figures are accurate, clear, and legible — which is exactly where an author-controlled, editable figure workflow compresses hours of vector drawing without giving up scientific control or authorship.
7. Create Your ASH 2026 Figures with AI: The SciFig Workflow
You already have two things most colleagues do not: your accepted abstract text and a clear understanding of your study's mechanism — use both to draft your figures, then edit each element until the science is exactly right and you can sign off on it. Remember the framing from the previous section: you drive every step, you review the result, and you remain responsible for accuracy and for disclosing tool use per ASH policy. Here is the SciFig workflow for an ASH presenter:
Path 1 — Upload your accepted abstract PDF. Drop it into PDF-to-Figure. It reads your Background, Methods, and Results and returns a starter mechanism or pathway diagram to begin from — a first draft you then correct, not a finished figure. (Your abstract itself carries no figure, so this simply turns your own text into a starting point you control.)
Path 2 — Copy a structured prompt. For a mechanism or pathway figure, Text-to-Figure gives more control. Copy and adjust to your study:
Schematic of a CAR-T cell mechanism: a chimeric antigen receptor with
scFv, hinge, transmembrane, costimulatory, and CD3-zeta domains on a
T cell recognizing CD19 on a B cell, triggering perforin and granzyme
release and lysis of the target cell.
Path 3 — Sketch and scan. If you sketched your hero figure on paper, photograph it and drop it into Sketch-to-Figure to get a publication-style version that preserves your topology, which you then refine.
From any path, you edit individual elements in the vector canvas — adjust labels, colors, receptor and domain placement — then export to editable PPTX or layered SVG for final composition, at high resolution for the large poster print without artifacting. A new SciFig account starts with 150 starter credits plus 50 refill credits every day, which covers a full set of poster figures for most authors. For the companion guides in this conference series, see the EHA 2026 poster guide, the SITC 2026 poster guide, and the ESMO 2026 poster guide.
Optional — disclose your AI use (ASH requires it). ASH prohibits AI-generated posters and slides, but it permits author-controlled tools you build and review yourself, and it expects you to disclose AI assistance and remain the responsible author. If you construct and verify a figure in SciFig, you can add one line to its caption — for example: Figure created by the authors using SciFig and reviewed for scientific accuracy (scifig.ai).
Start your ASH figure from prompt, PDF, or sketch
Use the path that matches what you already have, then edit every element until the hematology is exact.
Try Free8. ASH 2026 Presenter Disclosure, Embargo & AI Policy
Every ASH 2026 presenter must complete the conflict-of-interest (COI) disclosure, honor the abstract embargo, and follow ASH's strict AI policy — so plan disclosures and tool use alongside your figures, not after. ASH's abstract embargo runs from the moment you submit until the meeting ends, meaning results should not be publicized ahead of your session, and copyright in an accepted abstract transfers to ASH. Your poster and slides should also carry the disclosure statement your COI forms require.
The AI policy deserves particular attention because it is stricter than at many meetings. Per the official ASH call for abstracts, machine-learning and AI tools such as ChatGPT cannot be listed as authors, and — in ASH's own words — "generation of original text, slides, and posters using AI tools is prohibited." ASH permits narrow uses such as spelling and grammar checking within closed systems, or revising existing author-written text under human supervision, and it does not allow treating AI output as a primary source. The practical read for figures: do not have an AI generate your poster or slides for you; instead use a tool the way you use vector illustration software — you author, edit, and review every element, you remain responsible for the science, and you disclose tool use as ASH requires. That is precisely the author-controlled workflow described in the winning-poster section.
9. Where ASH 2026 Abstracts Are Published (Blood)
Accepted ASH 2026 abstracts are published in Blood — ASH's official journal — as an online abstract supplement (conventionally Supplement 1), which becomes the citable version of record. Searches for "ASH 2026 abstracts" or the "ASH abstract PDF" almost always mean this Blood supplement, hosted at ashpublications.org/blood.
Because your abstract enters this permanent Blood record — as text only, with your figures living on the poster and slides rather than in the abstract — it is worth making sure the science reads consistently across all three. Once the supplement is live, use it to confirm the citable version of your ASH abstract, then keep every figure on your poster and in your deck telling the same study story.
FAQ
References
All specifications and dates above are drawn from official ASH materials, accessed July 21, 2026:
- American Society of Hematology. ASH Annual Meeting — Home & Key Dates. hematology.org. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.hematology.org/meetings/annual-meeting
- American Society of Hematology. ASH Annual Meeting — Call for Abstracts (Abstract Policies, AI Policy & Embargo). hematology.org. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.hematology.org/meetings/annual-meeting/abstracts/call-for-abstracts
- American Society of Hematology. ASH Annual Meeting — Meeting & Presenter Resources (Poster & Oral Guidelines, Official Templates). hematology.org. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.hematology.org/meetings/annual-meeting/meeting-and-presenter-resources/presenter-resources
- Blood. American Society of Hematology. ashpublications.org. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://ashpublications.org/blood
Disclaimer: This article is educational content focused on scientific figure design for conference posters and presentations. It is not medical advice and should not be used for clinical decisions. Dates and specifications are summarized from official ASH materials linked above and were accurate at the time of writing; always confirm current details on the official ASH website before printing or submitting. SciFig is a scientific illustration tool — it does not diagnose, treat, or advise on patient care.
