Final Thoughts on Photon 14

As a finally summing up about my experience at Photon 14, here's short list of some ideas and thoughts about the conference and what I might do at conferences in the future.

Just in case you missed my original Photon conference diaries, they can be found in 3 parts here, here and here.

So after Photon 14 I think that....

1. Poorly constructed talks really annoy me so I promise to do my best to always construct my talks well.
   At the conference I saw a few talks that really missed the mark for me. Most of the problems stemmed from a very simple sentence, "I'll just skip over this slide for time". Now, to me that smacks of being under prepared and to an extent I think it doesn't look very professional. Another pet hate I had was "Here's a concept that is important to this work but my colleague will talk about that in a few minutes". If its important to your work you should describe it, I might not be here for the rest of the session. Other's peoples talks shouldn't be used to convey your key concepts, as we don't all have the luxury of that and it isn't fair. So rant over, to sum up this means that I think that it's important that you have rehearsed your talk well and that it is fully self contained.
2. Tablets are useful and yet not useful at the same time for note taking.
   I made notes on my iPad during the conference which, on the one hand, worked really well as I didn't have to write them up and struggle with my dodgy handwriting! On the other hand it was actually harder for me to type and listen than write and listen, but I got better at that with practice so I think that wouldn't be a problem next time. Also, there was quite a temptation to procrastinate as there was all of the internet at my fingertips. So, I found the best way to use a tablet was to turn the wifi off and use a note-taking program to help with taking my notes.
3. You should always tell people what you are doing.
   It's well worth explaining what you do to anyone you meet at a conference, as you never know where it might lead. I spoke to a couple of people about what I did and one conversation might well lead to a collaboration. So it's always well worth having an elevator pitch of your project to hand just in case!
4. You should take in concepts in talks that don't necessarily link directly to your work
   I found it was worth really listening in all biologically related talks as it actually helped me notice trends in research and work out where I might fit on the greater landscape of research (and what might make my work stand out). Even in some of the very tangentially related stuff it's worth taking stuff in. I found finding out about the amazing properties of fibre optic cables really interesting. It is something I'll remember and you never know, it might come in handy someday! 

And that concludes my coverage of my last conference of the year! 

I don't know if I'll be going to many more conferences in the next twelve months as I might just be chained to my desk writing. But I hope than my diaries and thoughts on my experiences have been interesting and (hopefully) entertaining too!

Photon 14 Fun Times 3 (Wednesday 3rd and Thursday 4th September 2014)

Wednesday - Day 3

In comparison to the first two days of the conference Wednesday was a lot less exciting or busy. I had nothing to worry about and no real must see sessions to focus on so I went with the flow a bit. The first session I went to was on 'Ultrafast and Attosecond Physics', a pretty impressive title. So what motivated my choice? Well, firstly it sounded exciting and it had two talks on spectroscopy going on, so it sounded like the best option for me. There were some good presentations, but I don't really remember them very much to be honest, as there wasn't a whole lot to take in but, that's life. Sometimes you get lucky, other times you don't. After lunch (still not great) I went to the plenary on translating your research into a product. That was definitely worth going to, with the current head of the institute of physics talking about her opinions on how research should become a technology. Interestingly she said quite strongly that the trend for spinning out companies from universities to sell the research, with academics heading up the new company, is not a good idea. I found that very interesting as Leeds and Sheffield seem into creating new companies to make money. The proposed alternative was that you should licence your work to an existing company and not be greedy about the money. It's curious, because if spin outs didn't work universities wouldn't keep creating them. Anyway, I have some food for thought now. Unfortunately, I didn't have a similar experience from the second plenary. The speaker was talking about the integration of light with metal, so at first I was fine, until he talked faster and faster and jumped around a lot. I think the most frustrating thing about the whole experience was that before he started the speaker said this was going to be an introductory talk! Ha! It definitely didn't feel like one to me.

So with the whistle stop tour of business and "introductory" physics over I had 2 more sessions to attend. I went with 'trapping and manipulation', which looked at ways of trapping and cooling molecules or atoms using lasers. I then went for optical and quantum metrology for the final session as it's related to what a lot of people in my lab do. Again the theme for the afternoon was interesting but not relevant, not helped by the fact I felt like I was reaching conference saturation point by this part of the day!

Wednesday did not end with the talks though, we had the conference dinner to go to. The dinner tried so hard to be gourmet. It really did, but it just couldn't match it's own aspirations. I mean on bake-off night they made the error of calling a chocolate roulade a terrine! Mary Berry would not be pleased with that! Culinary confusion aside, I had a really nice time and there were lots of free drinks, so they got that right. I also managed not to let the networking opportunity slide during the dinner. I chatted to someone from Leeds I didn't know and one of my supervisor's collaborators I hadn't met before (Yey networking). The cherry on the top was when one of my lab mates won a prize for his poster. With the meal done we headed home via an impromptu networking session with some other attendees (aka a pub trip).

Thursday - Day 4

Day 4 finally! Time to go home! Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed photon, but I really wanted to be back home. However, I did have a good time in the last two sessions before home. I managed to find a talk on monitoring biology through some really complicated laser work. It was certainly interesting, but I'm not sure if it will catch on because of its complexity, but there were some really nice ideas about trying to observe the light given out by a protein when it was doing different things. Hopefully there might be a way to make the process easier so that we can exploit it in the future. The final session I attended was on fibre optic sensors. It was a session that probably won't help my project, but it was really interesting. It turns out that you can use fibre optic cables with special elements in to act as sensors for temperature, humidity, force and more! And, people are working on incorporating them into metals and concrete to give in depth analysis about what's going on inside structures. How cool is that! One of the talks even covered a way to set concrete using microwaves! Sometimes you forget that there is some really fun science in the world and I'm so glad my last session of the conference left me thinking, and with a smile on my face.

Photon 14 Fun Times 2 (Conference Diary, Tuesday 2nd September 2014)

It was time. Presentation day. It started earlier than I thought it would, as I accidentally got up at 630am, thinking it was 730am... Oh dear. At least it gave me time to run through my presentation in my head once more and write my diary of what happened on Monday. I was already starting to feel nervous, why? Well, I had to present in this room, the Great Hall. 

The Great Hall at Imperial College

Pretty big right? Much bigger than the room at TERMIS, the only glimmer of hope was that it was relatively quiet on Monday so hopefully it wouldn't be too full. Still, I got ready and headed out for the morning plenary. I had considered skipping it so that I could go through my slides, but I'm really glad I went. The talk was given by Proffessor D Walker and was talking about the interplay between academic research and industry and was an extremely candid account of his successes and struggles in industry and in trying to deal with conflicts of interests his work entailed. Prof. Walker was a fantastic speaker and I took loads of notes of hints and tips to look back on later.

Before my session kicked off there was a coffee break, and after feeling pretty calm in the plenary I was starting become more nervous again. After adequately caffinating myself I thought it might be a good idea to have some calming camomile tea (well it always worked for Peter rabbit), before heading to the great hall for the first 2 talks of my session. Let's just say the camomile tea didn't work, in the first 2 talks I didn't feel less nervous, but I did just want to get my talk over and done with and let whatever was going to happen, happen. During the questions section of the speaker before me, I got set up with a radio mic and got ready to go. I'm some ways it was strange, when I was announced and walked up onto the stage my nerves faded a bit. I was here now, I was on stage and I just had to get on and do it. So I got on with the show. Although I went through the slides a little quicker than I wanted to, I managed to say everything I wanted to say with only a slight bit of uming. The best thing was that my hand didn't shake too badly when I laser pointed at the screen which I like to think created the illusion that I was more together than I really was. The next hurdle was the questions. To be honest, this was what I was dreading the most. I was steeling myself for criticism. But I got lucky. The worst I got was a, "would a standard set up beat this?", something I could confidently answer with a no. The other question I possibly left myself open for and was about exactly how much easier our set up is to create, but I think I gave a good account of myself and explained how I might improve things in the future. With that I could escape relatively unscathed. On the whole, I think my talk went pretty well, I was better at TERMIS, but I also practised more and wasn't as worried about the audience. That being said I didn't crash and burn so I'll call that a result!

After my talk there were 5 more talks, they were good, but it felt like a very long time. Especially given my tea consumption. Unfortunately I didn't have any feedback coming out of the session as my supervisor ran to my lab mates talk straight after mine. But I got some at lunch, firstly from another lab mate saying it went well (phew!) then a really great bit of feedback. A conference delegate came up to me and thanked me for giving a good talk that he was able to follow, and contrasted it to the other talks. We then had a chat about how surprising it is no one has done my experiment before and he suggested it could be possible to look at putting motorised lenses in. That made my day, you can't really ask for more than that. If at least one person from outside my lab understood and enjoyed my talk I could go home happy. Unfortunately, I didn't get any feedback over lunch from my supervisor as he was busy talking to various people, but I assumed I'd he him later. I didn't know his departure time so I ended up missed him, but he passed in that he thought my talk went well so that's quite nice I suppose. In case you're dying for another lunch update, it was similar to Monday in terms of sandwich fillings but with fancier bread which made it hard to tell what you were getting, so I'll keep my rating at 2.5 out of 5.

The first talk after lunch was 'How to get Published' and I was in two minds about whether to go or not because I've been to 3 how to get published talks in the past and, well, they haven't got me published! I made a few notes, but it wasn't a world altering talk so maybe it was a good  gentle warm up after lunch activity. We then had 2 more talks sessions to go to, firstly I went to another session in biomedical techniques where I heard about some interesting technologies for live microscopy. They were pretty cool and looked at imaging cells in zebra fish, so the idea was that this could help with drug development studies. However, I would question that, as if I've learnt one thing from my tissue engineering studies it's that as animal testing isn't that effective! 3d models in the lab with lots of cell types is the way to go if you ask me. My final session of the day was all about new imaging techniques, which I chose as the most relevant set of talks out of a lot of things I don't really do. I learnt a couple of things, but not anything useful in my project, but that's the thing with conferences, you have a few relevant things and a lot of irrelevant things and I can't complain as I've had over a day of relevant talks, much more than at TERMIS. So, the art for the rest of the conference with be working out tangentially relevant talks to go to, or just going to what seems interesting to broaden my horizons, and I'll let you know how that goes later.  Right now I think I need a sit down with a good book.

(The Lies of Locke Lamora, if you're not reading it read it I've told you enough times. Oh. If you're under 18 you possibly shouldn't... But still make sure you get a copy when you're old enough. I should shut up. I'm rambling, see, this is what conferences do to you!)

Photon 14 Fun Times 1 (Conference Diary, Monday 1st September 2014)

Ah sleep, how I love it so and yesterday the first day of Photon started with not much of it. After a 430am start and a first train at 545am we made it to Imperial College for the first day of Photon14!

Things kicked off, as they invariably do, with a plenary lecture. A plenary is basically a big invited talk that everyone should probably attend. Our plenary was given by Professor Sir Peter Knight (I bet that being Professor Sir makes filling in forms tedious) on quantum technologies. It wasn't really about the science behind quantum technologies, more the work Prof. Sir Knight had done to secure funding for the field and what the government might expect us to produce in the near future as a return on that investment. It was quite a refreshing opening plenary, but it did make me wonder who was involved in setting government expectations.

After the plenary, we broke up into different sessions, with various specialist themes. There wasn't much that directly related to my work, so I plumped for "Adaptive and Active Optics" because it was going to be about laser related stuff. I think I probably made the right choice as although I don't know if I'll use what I learnt. However, I'd say that I now have a greater idea of how adaptive optics work, mainly through using deformable mirrors which you can change the shape of to optimise your optics set up. As this session concluded the morning, it was time to see just how well photon was going to perform as a conference by sampling it's lunch offerings! Conference lunches are important ok! You need something to look forward to and it needs to get you through a very long afternoon. So, the food. It was average, although I don't know if that's fair as my bar was set by Italy and I don't honestly think anyone will ever beat that, but they should still try to! The buffet was a mix of standard university catering sandwiches and fruit, but there were some nice surprises in the form of mini-meat pies and mozzarella sticks. So I'd give it a rating of 2.5 out of 5, however, change could be afoot on Tuesday and Wednesday as that is when we require tickets to get our lunch!

After being fed I wen to a careers talk entitled "making the most of your early career". We were told at the start it wasn't a hard sell for the institute of physics and their careers services, but it definitely was. I basically learnt what booklets I should look at downloading from the institute's website and the other advice was highly generic. I wanted to know what would make me stand out! How to know what to choose! There was one thing I hadn't thought of and that was becoming a journal reviewer, but I think that's for post docs really. At least the next plenary was good, and signalled the start of stuff more important to me, with the speaker talking about imaging single cells in the eye using light microscopy. It was interesting, although it seemed most of the functional imaging relied on the use of chemicals or viruses to create contrast and it don't think doctors would be too happy with that.

The next 2 sessions were focused on biomedical optics, firstly looking at spectroscopy (in slightly different forms to what I do) and then clinical methods. I didn't get as much out of the first session as I had hoped, but the second section was great! There's some exceptional work going on to manipulate endoscopes to make it possible for them to be used as microscopes. This could mean that you just use an endoscope to look at a tissue sample, rather than doing a biopsy, or you could get a better biopsy. Even better in cancer surgery the surgeon might be able to check if a tumour was fully removed while surgery is still happening, rather than having to send off the tumour for analysis, a process which takes days. Therefore, people will only need to have 1 operation rather than 2 if not all the tumour is removed in the initial cut.

After dropping stuff off at the hotel we nipped back for the poster session and drinks reception, aka the networking session, but we won't call it that. To be honest I neither networked or read many posters, mainly as I did my round of the posters at lunch and I really didn't feel up for networking. The other networking barrier was the fact my supervisor wasn't there. At TERMIS one of my supervisors introduced me to a lot of important people in the field, but that opportunity wasn't open to me last night. Oh well, there's always tomorrow! If I survive my presentation that is...

TERMIS - Reflections and Diary Links

Good afternoon! Now I've had some time to get settled back into the swing of things at home I thought it'd be quite nice to round off my TERMIS coverage with a bit of an overview of what I got out of it. My diaries mainly focussed on the things that actually happened, rather than the bigger picture of what I've taken away so here's a look at what I distilled from my experiences.

What did I learn?

• Most obviously, I picked up lots of new scientific information from the conference, which is exactly what you would hope to do. However, it's hard to guarantee how much you'll pick up before hand, as you only really know what you'll get out of a talk once you've seen it. 
• I'm not half bad at networking, especially if I break myself into it bit by bit. In the event of nerves, wine and cheese help!
• Drama techniques are fantastic to apply to presentations. (I presented at my old college today and that found not warming up made a big difference)
• Practice really does make perfect. It really felt good to be able to present on auto-pilot as it took a lot of the stress out of the experience.
• Conferences are as much about the social events as the presentations because these are where you make contacts and start collaborations. However, that means during the social events you are actually working, so you don't have chance to fully relax! I wasn't very well prepared for the social program to be so intense, but next time I will be.

What will I do next time?

• Take my own notebook. At TERMIS I just used the supplied paper in the conference pack, but it wasn't very good and I didn't really have enough, so next time I should just buy some and not be such a cheapskate!
• Write up useful notes as I go along. I had a full day of writing my TERMIS ones up when I got back and I don't want to do that again!
• Take a tablet, not a laptop. Tablets turn on quicker and are great if you want to flick through your slides without changing them or check e-mails.
• Practice, practice, practise any presentations. It's totally worth it.
• Be prepared to stay out late and party (for science of course).
• Try not to be afraid to speak to someone, people may not feel comfortable starting a conversation, but they will often join in if you kick things off.  
• Have a spare pair of suitable shoes! My feet got a bit shredded by the shoes I took and I didn't have an alternate pair of flats to wear.
• Get more involved with the young scientists program. I didn't get around to doing the mentor meet and co-chairing of seminars that the SYIS program offered, but next time I should make the effort to get involved.
• Poster harder. I didn't hit up the poster sessions as well as I could, so next time I need to focus less on the food and more on the posters!
• Take time off after the conference. I got home from Italy on Saturday night and I was back at work on Monday, but I think I really could have done with an extra day off to help me recover. I don't feel like I was very productive at work last week so it would have been better to write a day or two off as leave so I could've had a day to myself to just just sit and relax.

Just in case you missed my conference diaries the first time round my day 1 diary is here, my day 2 and 3 diaries are here and my day 4 and 5 diaries are here!

TERMIS Diary- Days 4 and 5

Here are my final 2 diaries from TERMIS and include highlights such as my presentation (eek!) and the conference dinner! I'm going to follow this up with a post linking to all my diaries, along with an overview of some of the key things I've learnt from my experience. Remember, feel free to ask me as many questions as you want!

Day 4

Ponente room, my presentation venue!

Today was D-day or rather P-day. I got myself ready at the apartment nice and early and dove straight into doing some of the vocal warm up’s I've learnt in my theatre group. They’re very effective, but sound quite strange to someone listening from the outside so either my colleagues are doing a great job of pretending they didn't hear me, or I actually got away without anyone listening in. I felt a bit nauseous before getting to the conference centre so I skipped breakfast and just went with drinking lots of water before going to the seminar my talk was part of. When I got to the room I needed to present in the panic really set it. To start with I’d forgotten the order of my slides, so I quickly used my netbook to run over them vaguely in my head before the seminar started. I then suddenly thought “What if someone asks me what the spectrum of bone is like?” realised I couldn't remember that either and desperately tried to get an image of the spectrum up using the conference internet. Unsurprisingly, this was one of the times when the internet just wouldn't work and I had to give up on that pretty quickly. I can't decide whether the timing of my talk was helpful or not from a nerves perspective. On the one hand, I was in the first session of the day. On the other hand, I was right at the very end of the first session and as the talks went on I started feeling more and more nervous, constantly noticing if more people were coming to the session or leaving (more were coming) and how tickley my throat was, but with an hour and a half to sit through I wanted to be careful not to drink too much water! Once the session started I was able to keep my mind on the talks quite well up until the one before mine. When I was called to the podium I managed to calm myself (up to a point) with lots of deep breaths, before launching straight into my talk. I made one slip up on the second slide where I said I would explain “What is tissue engineering?” rather than “What is Raman spectroscopy”, but I managed to recover. From that point on I was on auto pilot. I’d practised, practised and practised my talk so much that I was in performance mode, reciting my lines and playing the part of a knowledgeable scientist to the attendees. It’s strange. I can only really remember the bits of the talk where I laser pointed at the screen! Then it was over. I had one question. A very nice one about my thoughts on an interesting effect we’d noticed with some of my samples and I was done. The relief was immense! I was shaking a bit as I went to get my things and was roundly congratulated on a presentation well done by my supervisors and colleagues. I’d done it. My first conference presentation is over!

After the break, I went to see an excellent keynote on the nature of bone marrow stem cells in the body and how its seems that cells around blood vessels can actually become bone marrow stem cell like. I think it’s pretty common knowledge to some biologists, but it was all new for me and was pretty mind blowing. I decided to take a mini-break after the keynote to send texts home to tell people that my presentation went ok and to ring my better half (who had the conference program open on his laptop, trying to work out when I would be done). With that done it was back to the standard thing of watching more presentations! My favourite, was once again, the big plenary of the day by Professor Badylak, who's been doing some incredible work on repairing muscles in cases of significant muscle loss using tissue engineered scaffolds. The results he presented from the pre-clinical trial were simply incredible. 

It was then time for the 'Students and Young Investigators' evening. Which, after the success of the other social elements of the conference so far, was a bit of a let down. The bar we were in was beautiful, no doubt about that, but that meant expensive drinks and very small plates of food! The group I was with (Team Sheffield plus some lovely fellow students from Germany and the Czech Republic) nipped out for some ice cream (definitely worth doing) and came back to find most of the people gone, which was probably due to 330ml bottles of beer costing 5 euros. I did have a good evening over all (and was once again out later than planned), it was nice to be able to relax and chat. But for next time, in order to keep people together and networking, they really need a cheaper venue!

Day 5

I made it to the final day of the conference! There weren't many sessions that screamed out at me today as 'PhD useful' so I looked at what sounded interesting or fun and I ended up going to talks on simulating cells growing in a bioreactor on a computer, rapid prototyping and inkjet printing scaffolds. It was a nice and short day of talks, finishing at about 6pm to give us time to get ready for the conference dinner and pre-tours of the palaces of Genoa!

After changing at the apartment (going via a supermarket to pick up some Genoan  pesto to take home, you just have to) we headed down to the posh part of the old town for the palace tours. The two palaces we visited were filled with artwork, it wasn't really my thing, but it was a really nice opportunity to wander around some beautiful buildings. In the first palace we visited, we made it up to a viewing platform on the roof, which gave us some wonderful panoramic views of Genoa, right from the old town, to the docks and new town. It was a brilliant way to start the evening. Wandering around the houses and looking at the views, I couldn't help being strongly reminded my of the houses and city views in Assassin's Creed II, I could just picture Ezio running around the old town roof tops and shimmying into the courtyards of the cities richest families... yeah. I can never let the geekiness go.

Views of Genoa

Then came one of the highlights of the conference. The social dinner in the beautiful Palazzo della Meridiana, I'm going to go a bit George RR Martin and gush about the food now, so if you don't want a run down akin to the description of the feast of 77 courses, look away now!

Palazo della Meridana fresco

The conference dinner.

So, when we got into the Palazzo, we were supplied with a glass of prosecco and nibbles of yet more parmasan, which I'm starting to think should be the only way to start a formal dinner! The entry hall we were in was lovely, but it did make me wonder whether we would be standing to eat. Thankfully, my fears were most definitely alleviated when we were shown to the dinning rooms. It was breathtaking. The fresco on the ceiling, the carved stone fireplace, the platers on the table and not one but 3 wine glasses per person! It's safe to say I was more than a little awed. Then there came the food, all 4 glorious courses in true Italian style starting with seafood salad. Now, I'm not a salad person, but this was definitely my kind of salad as it was really just a seafood selection with a gherkin! We then had our pasta, a lovely thin pasta (small pieces to avoid having to slurp) in (not so surprisingly) Genoan pesto. I made a slight error as I didn't realise my server was waiting for me to say when to stop serving me (the others hadn't) so I ended up with quite a plateful (Maybe that was more of a happy accident than a mistake...). Next was amberjack fillet with pine nuts (there's a theme here) and potatoes. I'd never had amberjack before, so it was good to try something new. Finally, we got desert served with accompanying desert wine, a frozen mousse with grand marnier sauce, perfection! Even better was the fact Atra couldn't finish her's so I got one and a half deserts. You might think that would be the end of the culinary delights, but you'd be wrong. There was a selection of Italian pastries to enjoy (I managed one, it would be rude not to), a free spirits bar and espresso for those insensitive enough to caffeine to have strong Italian coffee at 11pm at night. Needless to say, it was a brilliant way to end the conference, full from a lovely meal, enjoying a disaronno on the rocks, chatting with my new friends from Sheffield about all things geeky. You can't get better than that! Well you could if you didn't end up going to bed at 1am and having  to get up at 7am. That could have been significantly improved... But, apart from the general lack of sleep, it was a fantastic end to a fantastic week. A week of firsts and fun, I might actually be looking forward to Photon14 (my next conference in London) now! 

TERMIS Diary - Days 2 and 3

I'm back! I made it home from the conference on Saturday so things are beginning to get back to normal. Here are my diaries from the first two days of my conference experience at TERMIS/EU the meeting of the EU chapter of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society. If you want to have a look at some of the official conference information you can find it here. and the abstracts from the conference can be found here (I'm on page 113 (75 of the pdf) and I'm very excited that something I wrote is in a journal). Hopefully, my dairies will give you a window into what academic conferences are like, but if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

Day 2

On the second day of TERMIS the science Gods gave to me one ryanair flight and a drinks reception by the sea!

Things are now officially under way now at the conference. I am now in Genova, after flying in with one of my supervisors and despite a slight hiccup with my suitcase falling off the baggage carousel the wrong way, things are going pretty well. We have a lovely apartment which I managed to find on my own, I'm registered, and I have some idea of the things I'm going to see tomorrow. The main thing so far that I wasn't prepared for is the heat. I'm definitely a cold whether person so temperatures of nearly 30 degrees make me want to melt! In terms of what actually happened at the conference, we had plenary talks (which are 30 minute plus lectures of particular importance) by some of the giants of tissue engineering. It was a really good opportunity to see some of the big academics in the field give their thoughts on where next for tissue engineering and what strategies we should use which, incidentally, they didn't agree on!

The view from the aquarium

After my first gelato of the trip on the harbour side (which was a great opportunity for my supervisor to point out particularly important people to me), I went to the conference opening social, the ambiguously named "Welcome Cocktail". Would there be food? How many drinks would we get? Thankfully the event surpassed my expectations immensely. The reception was held in an aquarium, so we were able to tour the attractions before the reception, meaning I saw manatees, dolphins, seals and penguins! A very unexpected but very welcome treat. The reception itself was lovely, many drinks (not just one) were on offer and we had a full buffet laid on that was continually refilled. The highlight was definitely the huge wheels of parmesan that you could just shave bits from, I was in cheese heaven! But the food is only half of the story, drinks receptions = networking, or at least attempts at networking. Dun dun dun! I am not a networking fan. Oh no. Not me. Trying to speak to people you don't know, but who all seem to know each other is something I'd rather  not do... But I did it! Thanks very much to my supervisor introducing me to people. But. But! I managed to come up with appropriate things to say in the conversation and not melt into the floor and I even managed to strike up bits of conversation independently with a few PhD students. Win! So I dedicate this victory to the wine. I can definitely say that today I learnt networking goes better with alcohol. Maybe in the future I should carry a hip flask with me. Or just get over it...

Day 3

Magazzini del Cotone Conference Center

It's now day 3 of the trip and the second day of the conference proper so everything has kicked off and is in full swing. We're now into the nitty gritty of the conference, attending presentation after presentation after presentation and learning about all kinds of new and exciting research. Yesterday’s 3 half hour lectures were most definitely just a warm up. Boy is this tiring! We're doing 830am to 730pm (with around 2 hours of breaks). I find it really hard to sit and listen for that amount of time! Especially when people dive into more hard core biology when my brain would really rather drift off and I have to fight to stop it. Having said that, there were lots of really interesting talks and I've attended presentations on the diverse topics of imaging, bone tissue engineering, bioreactors and more. My favourite lecture was on the use of simulations to predict the process of tissue repair and the application micro-CT techniques to image implants and showed some really exciting results. The main blot on the horizon is the lack of drinks around the venue even though there are plenty of bottles around. The problem is that the cups are way too small to allow you to get a good drink, which is not so fun in the heat. Also, every time I flick through the program I get the dreaded reminder that I actually have to get up and speak tomorrow. I think, or rather hope I'm ready. I can’t change anything else now as I've handed my slides over to the conference so I suppose I should stop worrying about it. Unfortunately that’s easier said than done; the last time I practised my presentation was on Monday night at the B&B which feels like a very long time ago now. 

Networking is still a big thing, tonight we had a “Sheffield Bioengineering and Health Technologies Group Meal”. However this quickly grew to be much, much bigger than I had originally anticipated. At first it was just people from the Dental School, then people from Sheffield University, then friends, collaborators and anyone else who fancied joining us. In the end it was a fantastic evening. We went to an amazing little restaurant in the middle of the rabbit warren that is the old town of Genova. The food was great, but also surprising as my lack of Italian meant I guessed what looked good and I ended up with a squid and octopus starter and a squid ink pasta main! I was also able to speak to the researcher who gave the big closing lecture of the day which was extremely exciting. I suppose it looks like I'm getting into this networking thing. Maybe. The only down side of the evening was the time we got back home, nearly midnight. Not exactly what I was hoping for with my presentation tomorrow, but it did mean I was tired enough to go to sleep without lying awake worrying for ages, so maybe that was a good thing...

TERMIS Diary - Day 1

As I write I'm sitting in a station waiting for my train to take me on the first leg of my journey to a tissue engineering conference in Italy. It's the first conference I'll have done a spoken presentation at, my first international conference and the biggest conference I've been to. To say I'm feeling nervous is a bit of an understatement! But I'm going to do everything I can to get my nerves under control and get the most I can out of the  experience.  As it's quite a big week, I've decided that I will keep a diary  of what I get up to while I'm away and try to put up a new mini blog up everyday (free wifi permitting), to give you an idea of what conferences are like.

So far today I've packed and repacked twice more my suitcase, checked my tickets, passport and wallet more times I can count, synced up my iPod. It's a bit of a relief to sit down and relax to be honest. The rest of my day is promised to be filled with a tube journey, another train and an early dinner before bed.

I'm now in my guest-house room, a few miles from Stansted. I'll tell you one thing, the smaller London stations aren't that fun! I've now got the lovely thing to do of wait for the morning and skedaddling to the station, with a bit of presentation prep in the middle. Fingers crossed I'll make it to the airport with no problems!