Last year I had the privilege and pleasure to attend (and present at) four scientific conferences. This year is shaping up to be just as wonderful, as I have been lucky enough to attend two conferences is as many months, marking the start of what I hope to be a productive year ahead. Here is a little about my recent European adventures, including my first oral presentation at an international conference.
Conference details:
Title: EMBL Proteomics in Health and Disease Mechanisms
Date: 7th – 9th March 2019
Location: Heidelberg, Germany
Overview:
Focused on the application of proteomics to cell biology and unraveling disease mechanisms by addressing conceptually novel ways to study long-standing questions in these fields. As most proteomics-based conferences tend to focus on analytical chemistry, the selection of biological topics is usually uneven. Therefore, this unique conference aims to showcase biology applications and build bridges to the disciplines where the technology’s promise is still not nearly fully realised.
There’s a first time for everything!
This was my first truly international conference. What do I mean by that? I have attended and presented at several Australian national conferences consisting of international speakers, but was yet to have travelled overseas to visit a conference in another country. Unfortunately, our isolation makes such an undertaking on a student or starting post-doctoral salary near impossible. In this case, I had been madly applying for every pot of travel funding I could find for the last year, and in a fantastic “it-never-rains-but-it-pours” moment I received all three of the grants I applied for! This meant I was able not only to travel halfway around the world and attend a pre-eminent conference in my field, I could also afford to visit some long-term collaborators for a week afterwards. All together, the two weeks of travel were almost entirely covered and this meant that instead of being consumed with the cost of my every move I could actually focus on the science.
Overall scientific programme and conference feel
Not only did I get to hear about all the amazing developments at the forefront of proteomics research worldwide, I also got to showcase some of my work to leaders in the field. This was an incredible opportunity, and while I was a little disappointed with my talk (owing to sub-optimal preparation and a large dose of nerves), I received overall positive feedback. As well as this, there was so many advances in techniques and biological understanding that I would have never come across on my own, at least not within the next 12 months while the papers are being sucked down the peer-review black hole!
As well as a stunning program, I feel I must give a bonus shout out to the EMBL organising team. Everything ran smoothly, was well organised and timed, and was superbly catered. There was also a small enough number of participants and a well-balanced program between students, post-doctoral researchers, principle investigators and moguls of the field. A conference I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the biological applications of advanced proteomics techniques.
So conferences are just an excuse to travel?
Conferences are the life-blood of academic knowledge sharing. You might think the enormous volume of published literature would be the best source of the up-to-date goings-on of the science world, but sadly in most circumstances you’d be wrong.
I have written before about the importance of conferences, particularly for those of us a little isolated outside the major American and European science hubs. This is because these conferences are essential for establishing and maintaining connections with colleagues, and for hearing about the cutting edge research being done in your field all over the world. As I alluded to above, unfortunately by the time most manuscripts have made it through the academic publishing process, six to twelve months have past (sometimes more) and there are more new and exciting developments already happening (with the advent of preprint servers such as BioRxiv this will hopefully change, but more on that in a later post).
For these reasons, conference attendance in particular for early-career researchers, is about so much more than the travel. Sure, it helps if the places you are visiting are enticing and if you can spare a few days afterward to explore, but the invaluable aspects of conference attendance always take precedence.
Lessons learnt
As my first international meeting, I learnt some new lessons about attending (and making the most of) conferences abroad
1. Multiply your typical organisation time by at least double. International travel, in addition to conference attendance and accommodation, requires a significant investment of time and energy to plan and book a reasonable itinerary.
2. Departure day is not that far away. I realised after madly rushing to finish my slides on the 14 h flight from Australia to my stopover, that I had perhaps underestimated how quickly my departure date would approach. I was so focused on tackling the seemingly all-so-important last minute experiments and meeting with my students to plan their activities while I was away, that the very reason for my trip got pushed to the side. The result was a less-than-flattering performance during my presentation, and a general feeling of exhaustion throughout the conference which dampened my social spirit. Consequently, I did not proactively initiate many interactions with other attendees, and therefore failed to make as many useful contacts as I otherwise could have.
3. Do your research, researcher! This mostly relates to scoping out the program beforehand. Sure, reading the headline speakers you should be able to identify any leaders that would be good to hear from. But more than this – look over the abstracts, and pinpoint those which are relevant, interesting or potentially useful. To assist this process, concurrently search the presenter in PubMed to get a handle on their other research. Unfortunately, an abstract may not do justice to a programme of scientific discovery, however reading the most recent/most cited articles will help you highlight not-to-miss talks. In addition, I got caught out this conference by an invited speaker whose most recent papers have been instrumental in my project design. Unfortunately, I recognised the first author’s name, and not the speaker (who was senior author on the papers in question) and therefore missed an initial opportunity to discuss this work in depth with the driving principle investigator. Having then done my homework, I was able to make this crucial connection.
4. There will be other conferences, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Sure, there will be uncomfortable moments, especially attending a conference in a foreign country surrounded by unfamiliar languages and faces. But the best in life happens outside your comfort zone. Unfortunately, it took me a significant portion of the short three-day meeting to push my comfortable boundaries, and after the first two days I left feeling as though I had not taken enough advantage of the opportunities a small meeting with superstars-of-the-field presents. I was disappointed in the impression I made over these two days due to my lack of will power to engage in the social activities, and this was compounded by the feeling of responsibility to those who had funded my trip (including the conference organisers, with a very generous stipend). Ultimately, by the end of the conference, I gathered the seeds of a few meaningful connections to chase up by email – and the very important lesson to make more of these meetings in person in future.
Final thoughts
There are plenty of downsides to science (hellloo no job security, poor work-life balance etc) and travelling (long-haul flights, little sleep, $$$) – but conferences provide a great opportunity to combine the best of both. I would thoroughly recommend this conference, or any in the series of EMBL Training initiatives, for early-career researchers looking for an excuse to visit Europe and beyond.
Have you attended any other international conferences or EMBL events you can recommend? Find me on twitter or head over to the contact page to tell me more!
Many thanks to the generous funding provided by the Bio21 Institute Post-doctoral Fellows Travel Grant, the University of Melbourne Faculty of Dentistry, Medicine and Health Early-career Researcher Travel Award and the EMBL Corporate Partnership Programme Travel Grant. Without these initiatives, this travel would not have been possible and I am so very grateful for the opportunities provided by these funds both at the conference and beyond.
Image credits: EMBL Conference logo sourced here
