It's the Final Countdown...

... will things ever be the same again?

I can't hide from it any longer. In 9 days time I'll got a year to go on my PhD. How do I feel about that? Pretty happy to be honest. I've had a tough few months research-wise so instead of being the panic station this threshold would have been a little earlier in the year, I'm actually pretty relieved.

In many ways, now is a good time to take stock and to attempt to work out what happens for me next in terms of work and even applying for jobs. In many ways this year won't be much different from the others. However, it looks like I'm going to have extra pulls on my time in addition to what I'm used to. 

Firstly, I'm going to be doing 'official' demonstrating work this year. I'm not sure how this is going to effect things for me other than I should get paid for work I was already doing. However, at the moment I am revamping a lab script and desperately trying to remember how I did my 3rd year project; which was 3 years ago. Yeah, that's fun. Beforehand, with my unofficial demonstrating if there were things I couldn't remember I could pass the problem on, where as now... Well, that's not really going to be the case. I think a few days stood in front of the laser going, "Why? Why!? WHY!?" should be enough to help me work out most things. However, I don't feel like I've really got the time to be doing that.

I'm also beginning to look at and think about applying for jobs. I know I'm a year away from finishing, but quite a lot of graduate schemes are already open for applications! Therefore, if you're a final year of degree, beginning to look for work in September and October for the following year is not a bad idea. There are jobs that won't be open for application just yet, but by thinking about this early I'm hoping to be clarify what I want to do (by reading websites and going to careers fairs) and I'll hopefully be prepared for when the right jobs for me open up, or I'll be able to apply before the ones currently open close.  

Then there's that other little thing I need to complete. My thesis. 70,000 words of joy for me to write. I haven't started so much on the words yet, but I do have a plan and a thesis template set up, so that's something, right? I mean I'm ready, I'm prepared, but not quite started yet. I actually don't feel that worried about writing up at the moment. As the day when I stop getting paid looms I'm sure I will be, but right now I'm ok with it. I've written big documents before and I'll have plenty to say, I'm just not looking forward to rewriting things.

So, final year starts here. Roll on next September!

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...

The Work/Life Balance

Depending on who you ask, there seems to be 2 conflicting ideas about PhD lifestyles. Some believe PhD students work all the hours of the day, through the nights and at weekends with very few days off. Others might argue that we're spinning our wheels, working short days and wasting time before we have to go and get a 'proper' job. As with most things there is arguably a slight ring of truth in both versions, but really neither are fully correct. I don't work all hours, and would not call what I do wasting time. I tend to work from 8:30am to somewhere between 4:30pm and 5:10pm (so pretty much standard working hours), but I have had a few short spells of working overtime (which was not very fun). But really, for me doing my PhD has been very much like any other job really, but with the benefit of having relatively unrestricted flexitime.

From PhD Comics purveyors of humour and home truths.

Now I'm not going to say there isn't someone somewhere who works every weekend in order to hopefully finish their PhD, and I actually know of one person who works really long days (11 hours +) because they just absolutely love their project and actually want to be in the lab all the time. But, in my experience, this is not the normal state of affairs. What seems to be more usual is that most of the time PhD students work normal hours, but every so often you'll have everything happening at once and will have to spend a couple of weeks or so working all the hours you can, in order to fit everything in. When do these times crop up? Well they tend to appear at the end of the year when you have a lovely report to work on (see 'So what exactly did you do this year?'). I had a month of long days and weeks when I was writing my first year report, but other than that I've not had any other real nightmare stretches. 

So, where do people get the idea that PhD students are chained to their desks? I think its something that's actually our (the students') fault. We keep the idea alive via our interactions with communities both on and offline and I'm not really sure why that is. Maybe it's because people feel the need to seek help and support when they are at their most stressed and tired, so a lot of the chatter is about dealing with the workload at these points in time rather than the staus quo. Also, I think we actually quite like to moan. Not to say that out moaning isn't justified, but it does seem to be a favourite PhD pass-time!

On the other side PhD working culture coin is the slacker. Is it actually possible to get through a PhD by hardly working? Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. Now, I think its fair to say that we all have quiet weeks in between experiments, where we're in limbo without a large pile of work stacking up for us. I've had points where I've been waiting for equipment to be fixed and although I worked on other things, my days weren't quite as full as they normally are. But can you sit back and take it easy all the time? Nope. You'll get kicked in some form, either kicked out or kicked up the bum to actually do some work. If you get a kick up the bum, maybe then you might end up not having enough time in normal working days to get everything done, becoming the quintessential overworked PhD student after all, an interesting thought don't you think?However, I would not advise coasting along until you need to suddenly knuckle down, its not going to be fun in the long run.

Like many things, PhD workloads come in cycles. The busy times don't last forever and neither do the quiet ones. All you can do is power through as much as you're able and remember that things will go back to normal hopefully sooner rather than later.

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...

Odds and Ends

Unfortunately, it’s a short-ish post from me today as things have been a bit on the hectic side. I don't have a big Easter holiday on the horizon so it's PhD business as usual for me! At the moment I have lots of different things that are demanding my time and attention which, while important, don’t do much to advance my project on the surface.

Firstly, conference season is on the way, so abstracts (short summaries of your work) need to be written, posters produced, presentations practised and travel arrangements made. I've been lucky enough to have an abstract accepted as a talk at a conference this summer and while I'm not writing my presentation for it just yet, it’s in Italy, so  there are lots of things for me to sort out before I even get started. I need to register for the conference before the price goes up (check), make sure I have my travel documents in order (nope), book flights (nope), transfers (nope) and a hotel (nope). All easier said than done when you have to claim everything back on expenses.

I'm also preparing a presentation to give to my physics research group in Leeds. I'm actually quite nervous about it as I've not had to present to a physics audience before. So, that means I'm well practised in skimming over the detail of the mechanisms that under pin my work and I know that this is what the other physicists will be really interested in. Even if it doesn't work out it’ll give me a trail run for the future, but if possible I’d much rather not crash and burn.

As much as I try not to, part of my brain is tied up playing the waiting game, something which I'm not very good at. I've currently got a paper on submission to a journal and I've submitted an abstract for another conference. When it comes to the abstract I should know before the end of the month if it has been accepted, but it could be a while before I hear anything back from the journal. Apparently 3 months is considered a quick turn around and I'm just reaching a month in, so I've got a while to wait yet. The worst thing about it is the uncertainty, there's no standard information system for journals so they can tell you as much or as little as they want about how your submission is progressing. I know I should just let it go and not think about it, but it’s really hard not to look for news when I'm checking my e-mail on a morning.

Finally, alongside these 'side' bits there is some ‘real’ work for me to do. I'm currently coding a program to help me process data more quickly than my current manual methods. I'm really enjoying this bit as I'm learning to use python and although it can be frustrating at times I really like coding and I get a real sense of achievement out of it.

It seems that sometimes in a PhD you have to be a bit of a juggler, keeping lots of balls in the air whilst on a unicycle (at least that's what it feels like). On the upside, it looks like I should be able to confidently say I have ‘good time management’ and ‘multitasking skills’ on my CV at the end of it all!

My advice on how to keep everything going? Don't think about it too much, make to-do lists for each week (I find I don't stick to daily ones) and ask for help sooner rather than later!

Why would you want to do a PhD?

This week I thought I'd talk about deciding to do a PhD, as I'm sure that quite a few people will be currently deciding whether to do one or not. As a health warning this post is based on my experience and is focussed on science/engineering PhDs as they're what I'm familiar with.

So, I why you might want to do a PhD? It’s one of those questions which has many answers for many different people. You could probably guess some reasons pretty easily, others are probably less well known outside the academic community. In my experience some of the most common reasons are:

• I love my subject and want to keep learning about it after my degree.

• I want to be a lecturer one day so I kind of need one. (Not 100% true by the way.) 

• I want to be a professional scientist so a PhD would be a really great way to kick start my career.

• I want to explore science and give research in something new a try.

• I love being at uni! I don't want to leave! I should do a PhD!

• Oh my God! What do I do now. SOMEONE HELP ME! Oh, you'll pay me to keep doing my final year research project... That doesn't seem so bad. 

Some of these are really good reasons, some not so much. However, at the end of the day who am I to judge people on what influences their decision making process. Your motivation doesn't really matter as long as you turn up and do what is expected of you. So if you want to do a PhD just because you want to stay at uni, I'm not going to tell you not to.

Having said that in an ideal world if you're choosing to do a PhD you should hopefully be pretty sure that you enjoy research and can handle the highly independent study that you're about to undertake. But how do you find out these things? From my experience your final year research project will help, but you can also find out by doing a summer/holiday research project, which I would thoroughly recommend to all undergraduates. Not only will it give you a bit of income over the summer, it's a great thing to have on your CV whether you want to do a PhD or not. Basically you sign up to work on a specific project for somewhere between 6 weeks and 3 months and see how it goes. Some require you just to turn up and do your work, others will want reports at the end and some will want you to do a presentation on your experiences. Lots of universities offer research placements for their students that are really easy to apply for (physics at Leeds takes 36 people into their research groups every summer). In addition there are opportunities to get research placements outside of your own university. These can be accessible through looking at career's service postings, the big nationwide sites like prospects.ac.uk, through organisations like the Odgen Trust or by going direct to a research group and securing your own funding from places like the BBSRC, Royal Society of Chemistry and the Nuffield Foundation (for keen scientists doing AS levels).

When I was an undergraduate I did two summer research placements after the first and second years of my degree and I had two very, very different experiences. My first placement was within my university's physics department and involved me hitting a keyboard for 6 weeks as I desperately tried to model the interaction of light with atoms by creating a program using specialised add-ons in C++. This just wasn't for me. Basically I spent my time trying to make something, anything work and I eventually wrote a basic user manual on the how to code models in the language. After that it was safe to say I was not a fan of research and I had no intention of doing a PhD. The next summer I found myself a new research placement in a Medical Physics department with idea of it boosting my CV ready for a clinical science career. In the end I got so much more out of the placement than just pure CV building. Once again I was hitting a keyboard (this time for 3 months), but I felt I was doing something worthwhile and really interesting. I was basically pulling numerical data out of simulated medical images and finding a set of equations which mimic the way a person sees a tumour in those images. It was great! I loved the research activity, I learnt how to use the programming language Matlab, how to write a paper and I got an insight into the careers of the people around me which was very useful. This gave me two clear ideas. Firstly, I liked research where I used my maths and physics skills to do something that I felt had a clear application and secondly, it might not be so bad to do a PhD after all and I should be able to handle it.

So, why did I decide to do a PhD in the end? My personal decision was based on a combination of 'I want to be a scientist', 'I want to explore science' and 'oh God, oh God what do I do now?' Which seemed like a good enough motivation at the time and has served me pretty well so far. What would my advice be after my journey towards doing a PhD and signing on the dotted line? Get experience, but don't judge a whole world of opportunities on one placement or project. Now I'm doing my PhD, I know that even my second placement didn't give me a full picture of what I wanted out of a research project and it didn't give me all the tools I needed to succeed. If you are leaning towards doing a PhD but aren't 100% sure, why not apply? You can always change your mind over the months it takes to get from application to contract. You can always come back and do one later in life too, but it might not be as easy to do as when you're fresh out of your first degree!

If you're a current or budding PhD student why are you aiming to get your doctorate? 
What experiences of summer research placements have you had? 
Let us know in the comments below!

What is Tissue Engineering and How Will it Help You?

I've previously mentioned that my PhD comes under the heading of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, but what is tissue engineering and what might it do for us in the future? 

The main focus of tissue engineering in many respects is the production of replacement tissues and organs in the lab which can be used to repair the human body. The overarching dream is that one day people will be able to have new organs which are available on demand. Why is this something that we want? Firstly, we might be able to use artificial tissues to treat new illnesses, improving quality of life for people by regenerating their bodies. Additionally, by having organs off the shelf, we could eradicate the transplant list. How brilliant would it be to live in a world where no one dies waiting for a transplant?  So, how do we make these new replacement organs and how far off are they from being in use?

It's safe to say fully manufactured organs are decades away from use, but small tissue replacements are closer general usage than you might think. The artificial trachea transplant reported in 2011 is a tissue engineering solution and there are tissue engineered patches for heart reconstruction along with tissue engineered heart valves and skin currently going through clinical trials. So we are beginning to move into the area of artificial, regenerative surgery.

How do we make artificial tissues and organs? Firstly we need to understand what gives an organ its ability function. An organ's properties come from both cells and the structure that supports them, made of proteins and other organic molecules, both of which are extremely important. So we need need a material to support cells and provide biological function along with a source of cells to fill this scaffold. At the moment there isn't a single solution to do this. Some researchers are using artificially made polymer materials to create scaffolds, but you can also make fully biological scaffolds. Some researchers are taking tissues from animal sources, removing the cells in it and using the decellularised tissue to provide a natural cell support with the inherent architecture needed to replace an organ. This may sound like a really weird idea, but this it is proving really successful in clinical trials and in many ways is using materials perfectly evolved for a function in an engineered tissue. Finding a cell source is a huge challenge. In some cases it's possible to implant a scaffold and let the cells of the body move into it over time. For example if you give someone an artificial bone or muscle then the scaffold provides mechanical function and cells are not needed immediately. However, when cells are vital where should they come from? In normal transplants patients have to be on immunosuppressive drugs in order to stop the body attacking the transplant, due to the recognition of foreign cells. Therefore, the ideal cell solution needs cells which come from a patient themselves. However, this is difficult in many ways; you need the right type of cells in huge numbers, that means cells must be harvested from a patient and grown in the lab. The most plausible way to do this is arguably to harvest adult stem cells which keep your tissues repaired in normal day to day life and make them into the right type for the scaffold. However, this is time consuming and expensive and could be considered to be the biggest barrier to tissue engineered organs.

What might tissue engineering do for you in the future? It could be a long time before we get to artificial full organ transplants, but you may receive tissue engineered structural tissue fragments for bone, muscle and blood vessel grafts sooner than you might think. However, direct tissue replacement are not the only thing tissue engineering is good for. Manufactured tissue samples could also be used to revolutionise drug development. At the moment it takes around a decade and a huge amount of money for a new drug to get to actual use in a hospital. In that time it will go through laboratory tests, animal tests and numerous human trials. However, the success rate of new drugs reaching hospitals is extremely low and only around 16% of drugs which start clinical trials succeed. The main problem is that animal tests and current lab methods do not give us the actual human response to a drug. Tissue engineering could help overcome this by creating mini-tissues, which we can connect together to create models to examine exactly how a drug effects every part of the human body. This would be a fantastic development on so many levels and could make life saving drugs cheaper and get them to patients quicker. It could also replace animal testing for medicines.  

Tissue engineering has the potential to impact on medicine in a huge way. With a lot of hard work and time, in the future we will receive manufactured organs and drugs developed on tissue engineered models. Fingers crossed this will save lives and improve the quality of life for many people around the world.

I've got an answer, but what's the question again?

Research is a funny thing.  When I was choosing a project they all seemed so clear and well defined, but when I started work and had the chance to look behind the curtain it became clear that my first impressions were far from correct. In fact, you could even say that it is a truth universally acknowledged that PhDs must never be a beautiful journey on the shortest path from A to B. Instead there must be detours, dead ends, unexpected discoveries and changed priorities. The biggest trick of the final thesis is to sift through the mess and pretend that you did not in fact stumble around for three years, but that everything you did was all part of the plan.

After following the bumpy, dusty path of the PhD, where do you get to when you finally reach the end? Sometimes you end up at the original destination, having taken the long way around, but there never the less. However, those that walk this road are lucky. I am petty certain I'm not going to reach my initial destination. I don't even know if that destination is in the same country as the original one anymore. I suppose on first glance that doesn't seem like big deal, things changed and you ended up somewhere else. So what? The scary thing is that all these changes happen so subtly, so imperceptibly that you wake up one day and go. Wait a second, what am I doing!? I have data, but what on earth is this? What does it mean? What is the question I'm trying to answer? It's a strange place to be in, to have results and know that they say you've accomplished something but not know what that thing is. This all leaves you wondering whether you've actually done something meaningful or just gone off on a useless tangent.

The first clue for me that I was probably going to have a different destination from 'the plan' should have been that my project had major changes to my supervisors original vision from the get go. When I was originally chatting to my now supervisor about the project we decided to throw in some Raman spectroscopy on the strength of me being a physicist, having a contact at Leeds and being enthusiastic about it. So it should be hardly surprising my ride has been a little chaotic. However, at the time I thought I had a pretty rock solid plan. We had a goal in mind; to be able to analysis what bone cells were doing while they were growing using a home built spectrometer. We originally thought the point of interest would be in going back to first principles and stripping away the post processing algorithms of the shiny machines people always use, but we were a bit left of the mark. Building a Raman spectrometer should be easy; we thought! 20mW of power, well that's a lot! We'll have a working machine in a few months. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Although Raman is probably one of the most inelegant forms of spectroscopy where you just blast a sample with a laser and see what comes back, the task is harder than you would think. The biggest barrier to doing it is that the useful signal you generate is around a billionth of the power you put in. ‘Real’ low power spectrometers rely on seriously crazy calculations to work, which just wasn’t feasible for us. So we started testing different ways to use physics to extract the tiny Raman signals (making me feel particularly lucky to be part of a lab whose main expertise is in highly precise measurements of tiny things). Eventually, after a lot of blood, sweat and tears we completed our spectrometer and we think it works. Unfortunately, that all leads to a new quandary. We made a new thing, and that's awesome, but why exactly? What's the point, what's the story? 

In my mind the question I’m now trying to answer is the following:

'Does removing computational processing and using the inbuilt physics of Raman spectroscopy improve the results you can get?' 

Will that change before I finish? Probably, but does that really matter? Do you really need to have continual reassurance that everything is going according to the original scenario you created? I don’t think so. The more I’ve thought about finding my question, the more I’ve realised it’s something I may not know until I reach the end. I’ve got lots of different aspect to my work, which all have different challenges, so as I go I’m bound to stumble across all sorts of problems and solutions. Some of the work I do might not make it into my final thesis, but without those side projects I wouldn’t have made the big breakthroughs. I’m a person who likes to see the big picture, to always know where I’m going and why, which is probably why I would in many ways much prefer to be on a well-defined PhD path. But, more and more, I’m starting to accept that my ideal path just doesn’t exist. 

A PhD isn’t one dimensional and I shouldn’t expect the route to the end of a PhD to be one dimensional either.