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.
|
Name |
Department, Faculty |
Conference - Date Attended |
Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quarter 1: | |||
| Dr. Barbara Castellana Esteban | Obstetrics and Gynaecology; Faculty of Medicine |
5th Annual Canadian National Perinatal Research Meeting |
Banff, AB |
| Dr. Yanyong Guo | Civil Engineering; Faculty of Applied Science |
Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting |
Washington DC, USA |
| Dr. Teresa Ryan | Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry | TEDX Berkeley | Berkeley, CA, USA |
| Dr. María Eugenia Socías | Medicine; Faculty of Medicine |
18th International Congress on Infectious Diseases (ICID) |
Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Quarter 2: | |||
| Dr. Joanna Burgar | Forest Resources Management; Faculty of Forestry | International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) | St. Andrews, Scotland |
| Dr. Christian Damsgaard | Zoology; Faculty of Science | Oxygen Symposium | Sandbjerg, Denmark |
| Dr. Ji-Young Kim | Medicine; Medical Genetics | 27th International Congress of The Transplantation Society | Madrid, Spain |
| Dr. Saurabh Patankar | Forestry; Wood Science | 22nd Annual Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference | Portland, OR |
| Quarter 3: | |||
| Dr. Caitlin Mills | Arts; Psychology | Society for Text and Discourse | Brighton, England |
| Dr. Daniel Tobiansky | Arts; Psychology | International Behavioral Neuroscience Society Conference | Boca Raton, FL |
| Dr. Thomas Whyte | Applied Science; Mechanical Engineering | IRCOBI Conference | Athens, Greece |
| Quarter 4: | |||
| Dr. Nagesh Devidas Patil | Applied Science; Department of Mechanical Engineering | 71st Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics 2018 | Atlanta, GA |
| Dr. Camilo Perez Quintero | Applied Science; Mechanical Engineering | International Conference on Intelligent Robots (IROS 2018) | Madrid, Spain |
| Dr. Romain Tisserand | Education; School of Kinesiology | Neuroscience 2018 (SfN) | San Diego, CA |
2018 Q1
Dr. Barbara Castellana Esteban
5th Annual Canadian National Perinatal Research Meeting – February 2018
Thanks to the PDFO Travel Awards I was able to attend to the Canadian National Perinatal Research Meeting (CNPRM) in Banff, Alberta. The CNPRM is a unique conference where obstetrical and neonatal as well as clinical and basic research meets to bring new insight into maternal health, pregnancy outcome, fetal complications and early life disease origins. CNPRM was the right environment to establish new connections within the field and to improve my soft-skills, which could be very valuable at other levels in my academic career.
I presented my latest research on how maternal obesity affects uterine Natural Killer (uNK) cell biology in early pregnancy to other attendees and scientists from different fields in the reproductive research community that provided me positive feedback and advice. This work will help to better understand the etiology of obesity-related increased risks in maternal and fetal complications during pregnancy, which still remain unclear. And finally, in this conference I learnt about the leading edge research done in placenta and immune system in the uterus as well as I improved my knowledge in preterm birth, which is important and related to the research that we do in Dr. Beristain lab.
Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting - January 2018
The Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting is the most prestigious conference in transportation engineering. It attracts more than 13,000 transportation professionals very year from around the world. The TRB 97th Annual Meeting was held January 7–11, 2018, in Washington, D.C. The meeting program covered all transportation modes with more than 5,000 presentations in nearly 800 sessions and workshops. It is good chance to learn about the recent advances in the transportation domain from the policy makers, administrators, practitioners, researchers, industry, and academic institutions. I was invited to give an oral presentation about my research on Two Wheelers safety. The session I attended has a new format which is called hybrid session. The presenters give 6-8 minutes to describe their study. The oral presentations were immediately followed by a poster presentation in the same room. This hybrid session gives a better format to present my work in details and get feedback from experts in the domain. I had the chance to talk with the chair of Motorcycles and Mopeds Committee, Dr. Narelle Haworth, about my work, future study and the chance of cooperation. In general, the experience was fruitful as I had the opportunity to increase my professional expertise, interact with recognized, and get involved in TRB committee activities.
TEDX Berkeley - February 2018
In my presentation during the Blue Dot session, I explained how I became a scientist at the behest of my grandfather, and provided examples of my research aligned with Aboriginal knowledge systems. I also explained how I position myself in research as an Aboriginal woman and as a scientist. The Aboriginal salmon tidal stone traps provide a rich characterization of the harvest of salmon to ensure future production. At UBC Forest and Conservation Sciences we are investigating delivery of marine derived nitrogen to forests through our Salmon Forest project. The arrival of salmon in these watersheds and the exchange of ecosystem benefits have been understood by Aboriginal knowledge systems for thousands of years. Poor forest management through colonial history has led to vulnerable conditions for pathogens, high fuel loading exacerbated by climate change and leading to catastrophic fires. The Simard Lab “Mother Tree” project is also investigating silviculture treatments throughout the Interior Douglas Fir forests along a climate gradient based on nutrient transfer from dominant trees through mycorrhizal networks. These dominant trees favor nutrient transfer to their own seedlings, hence the association of “Mother Tree”. These two projects resonate with Aboriginal world views about nature’s connections above and below ground.
18th International Congress on Infectious Diseases (ICID) – March 2018
Attending scientific conferences has always been inspirational to me, updating my knowledge in the areas I worked, as well as helping to develop new research ideas. Specifically, attending ICID 2018 was a great opportunity to network and share experiences with other researchers and clinicians that similarly to me are working in the intersection of infectious diseases and substance use globally. Particularly relevant to my presentation at this conference describing the uptake of new Hepatitis C treatments among people who use drugs, through my participation in ICID 2018, I was able to learn about new developments in this area, as well as current and future research investigating how to expand treatment access, a key clinical and research gap in many settings, including British Columbia. In addition, attending ICID 2018 afforded an exceptional opportunity to consolidate networks with previous colleagues and supervisors from Argentina, that could serve for future mentoring opportunities as I seek to establish a career in clinical research in addiction medicine in Canada, as well as the basis for future research collaborations.
2018 Q2
International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) - June-July 2018
I have recently returned from the International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC). 2018 marked the 6th ISEC and a return to St. Andrews, UK – a fitting venue as the birthplace of ISEC and a tribute Steve Buckland, father to both ISEC and distance sampling. ISEC is a unique conference in that it marries statistics with ecology, and this year attracted 350 leading researchers from both fields. I took advantage of 2 full day workshops, gaining theoretical knowledge and technical skills in hierarchical modelling of species communities and animal movement models. Workshop instructors were authors of recently published statistical ecology textbooks and computing (R) packages. The plenaries and invited/contributed sessions provided excellent overviews of leading quantitative ecology methods and ways to derive the most from ecological data, particularly through integrated modelling. Informal discussions during the workshop/conference have already led to discussions of collaborating with two key researchers working on projects similar to my work at UBC. I had a great experience at ISEC – I was able to showcase and discuss my current UBC research to leaders in the field and I left inspired to incorporate some of the more advanced methods presented into current and future research.
Oxygen Symposium - May 2018
The Oxygen Symposium was a celebration of the career of Professor Roy E. Weber, who was my undergraduate supervisor, and who is an icon within comparative respiratory physiology. The 4-day symposium included invited talk from researchers within the field, and it provided a unique opportunity to interact with the top experts within my research area. I presented new work on the evolution of air-breathing within the vertebrates, which provided answers to several knowledge gaps in our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics in breathing mode. I received highly positive and constructive feedback from the attendants, which will be important for writing up the study. The meeting further provided opportunities to discuss ongoing and future research projects as well as future job opportunities. I highly acknowledge the Deans office for provided travel support for attending this great meeting.
27th International Congress of The Transplantation Society - June 2018
I had a wonderful time at the 27th International Congress of the Transplantation Society. The first two days of the conference were comprised of lectures on current topics in the field of transplantation by leaders in this field -- I learned a lot during this pre-congress workshops. During the congress, I had many opportunities to attend talks and network with other researchers and clinicians and share my research and learn about theirs, which helped to widen my understanding of other ongoing research and clinical activities in areas of transplantation. Moreover, I had an opportunity to give a talk on my research in front of a large audience and receive feedback and questions, which was highly valuable as they made me think about certain aspects of my research again.
22nd Annual Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference - June 2018
The theme of the conference was systems thinking in green chemistry. I presented my work on selective synthesis of vanillin from lignin and received appreciation and constructive critisism on my work. The critics were of the opinion that making vanillin is a canadian thing as softwoods are not readily available in other parts of world. However, they appreciated that the technology developed by me is divergent that can be applied to many sceraios apart from making vanillin from lignin. This gave me a new perspective on how should I structure the story when I write the manuscript on this work. The conference had three keynote lectures on three days of conference. The first was given by Dr Joe DeSimone from carbon Inc. He talked about integrating design and frabrication throgh digitisation to make defect free products. The second talk was given by Dr Don Sadoway from school of engineering at MIT. He discussed his experience in developing processes at research stage while elaborating on mixed metal oxide batteries. The third talk was delived by Dr Julie Zimmerman from Yale university on the future direction of green chemsirty field. I also benefitted from panel discussions on biobased chemicals that would shape my research perespective for next few years. I also participated in special networking session organised for students and postdocs and created new professional links. In the end, I would like to thank faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies for giving me this opportunity to participate in this conference.
2018 Q3
Society for Text and Discourse - July 2018
The PDF travel award gave me the opportunity to attend the 28th annual meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse in Brighton, UK. The international conference is multidisciplinary, bringing together scholars from disciplines like psychology, neuroscience, education, and linguistics who study aspects of discourse processing and text analysis. The conference was also co-located with Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, including joint poster sessions. This opportunity allowed attendees to experience an even broader range of topics and learn from others who may not have crossed paths otherwise.
Attending ST&D gave me the opportunity to showcase our recent research on how thoughts arise and unfold over time, and how it can be assessed using computational measures of cohesion. My poster highlighted one application of a think-aloud protocol to assess the ‘wandering mind’ – when there is no cognitive task that participants are asked to perform. I received valuable feedback about the methodology and analytical approach that will help in future studies. I had great opportunities to attend other talks and posters, in addition to interacting with other scholars in the field. All these events helped contribute to a successful conference experience, which was only possible with the PDF travel funding.
International Behavioral Neuroscience Society Conference - July 2018
I presented my work during an oral session at the 2018 IBNS conference. In particular, I gave a 15 minute talk on a large study that I had recently completed that explores the effects of maternal sugar consumption of offspring endocrinology, brain, and behavior. Many audience members were experts in behavioral neuroscience and had insightful questions that, upon reflection, will strengthen the manuscript of this study. I received good feedback on my talk and I, along with my advisor who was in attendance, considered it a successful talk. As a representative for UBC, I also had the chance to introduce myself and this novel data to leading scientist and peers in the field of behavioral neuroscience and reestablish relationships with individuals from my doctoral institution. These newly established contacts have the potential to lead to future collaborations and possible academic job opportunities. I was also able to attend talks and visit posters on unpublished data in my field, which allows to keep abreast of novel developments and explore up-and-coming methods and theories. In all, I am grateful that I was able to attend IBNS 2018 and I want to thank the UBC PDF travel award committee for supporting my academic endeavors.
IRCOBI Conference - September 2018
I presented my work during an oral session at the 2018 IBNS conference. In particular, I gave a 15 minute talk on a large study that I had recently completed that explores the effects of maternal sugar consumption of offspring endocrinology, brain, and behavior. Many audience members were experts in behavioral neuroscience and had insightful questions that, upon reflection, will strengthen the manuscript of this study. I received good feedback on my talk and I, along with my advisor who was in attendance, considered it a successful talk. As a representative for UBC, I also had the chance to introduce myself and this novel data to leading scientist and peers in the field of behavioral neuroscience and reestablish relationships with individuals from my doctoral institution. These newly established contacts have the potential to lead to future collaborations and possible academic job opportunities. I was also able to attend talks and visit posters on unpublished data in my field, which allows to keep abreast of novel developments and explore up-and-coming methods and theories. In all, I am grateful that I was able to attend IBNS 2018 and I want to thank the UBC PDF travel award committee for supporting my academic endeavors.
2018 Q4
71st Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) 2018 - November 2018
The division of fluid dynamics of the American Physical Society is one of the largest research societies in the world. This year’s conference was 71st Annual Meeting at Atlanta, US. In the conference, I was having a oral presentation. I had presented my work on “particle sorting effect from evaporation of droplet containing bi-dispersed colloidal particles”. It was a good experience to present in front of large audience. After my presentation 2-3 faculties from US/UK universities were interested to know more about my research work. One of the faculties showed interest to work collaboratively in future.
In conference, I had opportunity to see several oral and poster presentations, where I got to know recent advancements in computational as well as experimental techniques. To name few of them were: usage of higher order numerical schemes to improve the accuracy of numerical results, usage of PIV techniques to gain insightful information of any fluid dynamics problem, diversity of research problems in my field, development of biomedical equipments, etc. There were many studies which showcased the interdisciplinary research work. It was very enriching experience to get familiar with various other fields on a single platform in a 3 days of conference.
International Conference on Intelligent Robots (IROS 2018) - October 2018
Thanks to the UBC PDF travel award, I had the opportunity to attend and present our work "Robot Programming Through Augmented Trajectories in Augmented Reality" at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Madrid, Spain. This year, IROS has become the biggest scientific robotic conference with 3700 participants, evidencing the growing and importance of the field. The conference theme was "Towards a Robotic Society" with a 5-day program including 48 workshops, 3 plenary speakers, 20 keynote speakers, 1253 paper presentations, and more than 100 robot company exhibits.
To me it was a great experience to present our work on intuitive robot programming in industrial scenarios. I did a spotlight presentation and then an interactive session for 40 minutes in which I had the opportunity to expose my work to an expert community and get in contact with companies and research groups working on similar problems. For instance a member of Magic Leap (a US company that manufactures head-mounted virtual retinal display) told me that our current integration of robotics and augmented reality is one of the steps they are considering to start developing in their company, another research group from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology contacted me interested on do collaboration in augmented reality for industrial automation.
Besides the main conference paper, I did two workshop presentations, one in robot teleopretation and the other in sidewalk robotics navigation. During the workshop sessions, I had the opportunity to learn about multiple ongoing projects in human robot interaction. In summary, I had the opportunity to expose the exciting research that we are doing at CARIS lab in UBC and learn and interact with experts in my field from all around the world.
Neuroscience 2018 (SfN)
It was my first experience at SfN world congress. This conference is the biggest in the field of Neuroscience, with 28,000 attendees this year. Participating to this conference was the best opportunity to present my work to a broad audience I ever had. I had the time to discover a lot of different research projects, close to what I do but also completely unrelated. Connecting with passionate neuroscientists was very interesting to learn new processes, talk about future ideas and imagine ways of collaboration to increase the reach of my research. I spent four hours standing in front of my poster, and I never had a break. A lot of people came to discover and ask more about the research I am conducting at UBC. I made severeal contacts with recognized scientists in the field, especially with a team who conducts a research project complementary to mine. We have decided to collaborate and I really look forward to see the results coming out of this new project, which was born during the conference. My experience at SfN 2018 was very positive, I am grateful to everyone who made this opportunity become possible and look forward to new, passionate discussions about research!