What's the point of this conference? Modeling the physics of team formation at meetings*

How do scientific teams form? While this question has traditionally been the subject of qualitative study, new data sets have allowed us to develop and test quantitative models. Motivated by the process of chemical catalysis, we present a differential equation based model for the generation of new collaborations at conferences, quantify its performance, and compare it with other candidate models. We further examine the impact of conference modality---in-person or virtual---on model performance and on more general properties of scientific social networks.