Since its launch in 2011, the PDF Travel Awards have helped many UBC PDFs attend conferences to present their work, enriching their PDF experience and helping anchor them within the academic world. Please read below to find out more about past award recipients.
PDFO Travel Awards awarded in 2011:
| Name | Department, Faculty | Conference - Date | Location |
| Joanna Workman | Psychology, Faculty of Arts | Society for Neuroscience, November 2011 | Washington, DC, USA |
| Anna Prudova | Centre for Blood Research, Faculty of Dentistry | General Meeting of the International Preolysis Society, October 2011 | San Diego, CA, USA |
Society for Neuroscience - November 2011
The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting draws over 30,000 people from around the world in varying professions including research, medicine, and teaching. Conference activities include hundreds of posters and oral presentations organized into symposia, minisymposia, and nanosymposia. I attended both posters and symposia, which present the latest in neuroscience research. I was invited to deliver an oral presentation in a nanosymposium entitled, "Sex Differences in Stress-Related Anxiety and Depression." I presented data from a study I conducted here at UBC (in collaboration with Dr. Susanne Brummelte and under the supervision of Dr. Liisa Galea) investigating the effects of high stress hormones and hippocampal cell complexity during the postpartum period in female rats. This study has allowed us to further characterize a rodent model of postpartum depression and has laid the groundwork for investigating therapeutic interventions that are safe for offspring development. Delivering an oral presentation at SfN helped me gain exposure as a young investigator, which is particularly important, as I will be applying for faculty positions in the next few years. Receiving the PDFO travel award has allowed me to defray some costs associated with attendance and stay connected with other researchers in my area of interest.
7th General Meeting of the International Preolysis Society - October 2011
The International Proteolysis Society (IPS) conference is the major event in the field of proteases and their inhibitors, with the most recent one held in October 2011 in San Diego, USA. The meeting was attended by more than 300 researchers and featured 80 talks and 183 poster presentations, which were the highlight of this conference. With proteases being ubiquitous regulators of many biological processes and aspects of human health, the meeting covered different areas of biomedical research ranging from periodontal diseases to bacterial infection and cancer. The conference featured research from different fields of life sciences, from very mechanistic chemistry approaches to heavily biological animal studies and clinically-oriented imaging techniques. Such interdisciplinary nature of the meeting offered unique opportunities to learn and adopt novel research approaches from across the fields. Presenting our work at IPS provided me with an instant “peer review” feedback that is invaluable for further development of the project and preparing a strong publication. The conference offered a great environment for networking and for setting up new and seeing through our current collaborations. Overall, I believe that attending the IPS meeting was very educational, productive and thus beneficial for my research and training as a postdoctoral scientist.