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. Cecelia Campero | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs; Arts | Society for Applied Anthropology (PESO) - March 2019 | Portland, OR |
| Dr. Gu Li | Psychology; Arts | Society for Personality and Social Psychology 2019 Annual Convention - February 2019 | Portland, OR |
| Dr. Jerome Mayaud | School of Community and Regional Planning; Applied Science | Complex Networks - December 2018 | Cambridge, UK |
| Dr. Gregory Paradis | Forest Resources Management; Forestry | Systems Symposium in Analysis of Forest Resources | Puerto Varas, Chile |
| Dr. Sarah Rosengard | Earth, Ocean and Atmoshperic Sciences; Science | ASLO 2019 Aquatic Sciences Meeting - February 2019 | San Juan, Puerto Rico |
| Dr. Timm Treskatis | Mathematics; Science | SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - February 2019 | Spokane, WA |
| Quarter 2: | |||
| Dr. Sofia Bartlett | Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; Medicine | International Liver Congress - April 2019 | Vienna, Austria |
| Dr. Louise Chavarie | Zoology; Science | 5th International Conference on Fish Telemetry - June 2019 | Arendal, Norway |
| Dr. Filip Husnik | Botany; Science | GRC/GRS Conference on Animal-Microbe Symbioses | Mount Snow, VT |
| Dr. Sandra Irmisch | Michael Smith Laboratories; Science | Gordon Research Conference for Plant Metabolic Engineering - June 2019 | Lucca (Barga), Italy |
| Dr. Cara Manning | Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences: Science | MiniRUEDI Symposium and the EGU General Assemly - April 2019 | Dubendorf, Switzerland and Vienna, Austria |
| Dr. Sean Naman | Geography; Arts | Advances in the population ecology of stream salmonids V | Granada, Spain |
| Dr. Lorien Nesbitt | School of Population and Public Health; Medicine | inVIVO Planetary Health 2019 - May 2019 | Detroit, MI |
| Dr. Sarah Redmond | Medical Genetics; Medicine | International Society for Autism Research - May 2019 | Montreal, QB |
| Dr. Masatsugu Takada | Wood Science; Forestry | 41st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals | Seattle, WA |
| Quarter 3: | |||
| Dr. Arthur Bass | Forest and Conservation Sciences, Forestry | American Fisheries Society | Reno, NV |
| Dr. Robert Bittner | iSchool, Arts | International Research Society on Children's Literature | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Dr. Dominic Boardman | Surgery; Medicine | International Congress of Mucosal Immunology - July 2019 | Brisbane, Australia |
| Dr. Jared Grummer | Zoology; Science | Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution - August 2019 | Fredericton, NB |
| Dr. Elisabeth Rens | Mathematics; Science | Annual Metting, Society of Mathematical Biology - July 2019 | Montreal, QB |
| Dr. Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent | Forest Resources Management, Forestry | XXV IUFRO World Congress-Forest Research and Cooperation for Sustainable Development | Curitiba, Brasil |
| Dr. Stephanie Sellers | Rediology; Medicine | Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics - September 2019 | San Francisco, CA |
| Dr. Lauren Tindale | Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; Medicine | Options X for the Control of Influence - August/September 2019 | Singapore |
| Quarter 4: | |||
| Dr. Sarah Hutchison | Pediatrics; Medicine | Kids Brain Health Network Conference - December 2019 | Ottawa, ON |
| Dr. Hsiou-Ting Kuo | Radiology; Medicine | European Association of Nuclear Medicine - October 2019 | Barcelona, Spain |
| Dr. Nikki Salmond | Pharmaceutical Sciences: Pharmaceutical Sciences | Canadian Cancer Research Conference - November 2019 | Ottawa, ON |
| Dr. Avinash Thakur | Medical Genetics; Medicine | Epigenomics of Common Diseases - November 2019 | Cambridge, UK |
| Dr. Martha Vardaki | Michael Smith Laboratories; Science | SciX 2019 Conference - October 2019 | Palm Springs, CA |
2019 Q1
Society for Applied Anthropology (PESO) - March 2019
With the generous support from the PDF travel award, I attended the Society for Applied Anthropology-PESO (SfAA) 2019 Annual Meeting in Portland, OR, US. As first-time attendee to the SfAA, this was a unique and rewarding opportunity for learning new perspectives and methodologies in a variety of topics.
My interest was in water/technology issues. However, a large range of sessions were simultaneously running and covering important topics such as fisheries and marine policy and political ecologies of resistance. This was a great opportunity to overlap different knowledges with my on-going intervention project at UBC and it opened my eyes to future research avenues. I gave an oral presentation within the session “The Political Ecology of New Technologies, Practices, and Allocations of Water”, where I had the opportunity to connect with leaders in the field. The topic of my talk was about desalination. Water scarcity, climate change and demographic growth are driving the need for new technologies. I reported on the socio-environmental drawbacks, particularly in the expansion of the water market in Chile. My coauthor and I are expanding discussions of water as a commodity and changes in water cycles. I received encouraging feedback on my research, which is important for the submission of my paper to a peer-reviewed journal.
Society for Personality and Social Psychology 2019 Annual Convention - February 2019
With the generous support from the PDF travel award, I attended the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) 2019 Annual Convention in Portland, OR, US. The SPSP annual convention is the biggest academic conference in its field, hosting 4,000–6,000 attendees per year. As a first-time attendee who was previously trained in developmental psychology and health research, the SPSP 2019 Convention was an unique and rewarding opportunity to introduce myself to a new field of study.
In the preconference, I learned about admirable work done by leaders of intervention science. The talks are directly relevant to my on-going intervention project at UBC. I was especially benefited by a talk about designing intervention programmes to change people's mindsets and behaviours and by a panel discussion between researchers and community leaders on building and maintaining successful partnerships.
In the main convention, I presented a poster titled "Romantic orientation in LGB and heterosexual young adults: Similarities to and differences from sexual orientation." This work was initiated during my post-doctoral studies at UBC, in collaborations with colleagues in Hong Kong. My coauthors and I developed novel measures to examine the novel concept of romantic orientation. I had many attendees giving positive feedback and taking photos of my poster, and quite a few expressing interests to use our materials in their own studies.
The other talks, professional development workshops, and poster sessions were also refreshing. And I was able to make many useful connections. Therefore, I am very thankful for receiving the PDF travel award.
Complex Networks - December 2018
The Postdoctoral Travel Fund generously supported my attendance of the prestigious Complex Networks conference in Cambridge (UK) in December 2018. This was my first international scientific conference as a Postdoctoral Fellow at UBC, so it was with great anticipation that I joined many researchers whose work I greatly admire, for one of the largest gatherings of complex networks scientists in Europe.
I had secured the chance to give an oral presentation within the ‘Urban Systems and Networks session. The topic of my talk centred around networks of accessibility to healthcare networks. As urban populations continue to grow worldwide, cities are seeking to optimize accessibility to essential services, whilst maintaining equity across society. I reported on our efforts to apply a powerful machine learning tool, the self-organizing map (SOM), to cluster income characteristics and relate them to accessibility to healthcare across the City of Surrey, Canada.
The response from the audience was positive, with many searching questions posed. I received feedback from several researchers on our methodology and findings, which was useful for preparing the research for submission to a peer-reviewed journal some weeks later.
The other sessions, talks and posters at the conference were incredibly stimulating. The diversity of objectives, methodological approaches and results I was exposed to opened my eyes to new research avenues.
Systems Symposium in Analysis of Forest Resources - March 2019
The UBC PDF Travel Award provided financial support for my attendance at the 2019 Systems Symposium in Analysis of Forest Resources (SSAFR). Since 1975, SSAFR has been the premier international forum for operations researchers, systems analysts and management scienctists studying forestry, natural resources management and environmental problems. I have been an active member of the SSAFR community since 2011, and have greatly benefitted from being part of this key network of researchers in my field.
The work I presented at the conference is linked to the bioSAFE project, a large ongoing research project involving dozens of researchers across Canada (led by Prof. Richard Hamelin, Faculty of Forestry, UBC). A key activity of this project (led by Prof. Verena Greiss, Faculty of Forestry, UBC) involves development of a national-scale decision support system (DSS) framework to better manage forest invasive alien species (FIAS) in Canada. As technical lead of this ambitious DSS modelling project, I greatly benefitted from the opportunity to discuss ongoing model design issues with senior researcher and other experts in this field. Also, sharing our work at this key stage in the project may lead to valuable new collaborations at a later stage.
ASLO 2019 Aquatic Sciences Meeting - February 2019
The 2019 ASLO meeting helped broaden my professional network, expand my career goals, and solidify connections with my colleagues in aquatic sciences. I presented two talks at ASLO. My first talk in an ocean science education session featured the results from two projects I completed during my time at UBC, using art to in science classrooms from Brazil to Hong Kong. In this session, I met other individuals applying creative approaches to teach ocean science to a variety of audiences, some just located south of the Vancouver/Washington border, and received advice on how to continue incorporating my interest in outreach into a future career.
For my second talk, I discussed my primary research project at UBC in an applied science session. I met other scientists involved in using ocean observations to solve societally relevant issues in the Pacific Northeast Ocean.
After my talk, a student journalist interviewed me and wrote an article featuring my findings and collaborators at UBC. This article will be published in the Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin soon. I am grateful to the PDF Travel fund for enabling me attend a meeting that was successful, productive and inspiring.
SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - February 2019
With the remarkable number of close to 2,000 participants, the Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) 2019 in Spokane, Washington, was the largest conference of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to date. My highlights include some excellent talks and minisymposia, the hands-on minitutorials on state-of-the-art software packages as well outstanding opportunities for networking.
I had invited three more researchers to a minisymposium on the numerical analysis of viscoplastic fluid flows. During our actual minisymposium, over lunch and dinner we got involved in productive and specialised discussions, not only among each other but also with members of the audience.
While I had already experimented with the finite-element software Firedrake and the PETSc toolkit, the intensive workshops hosted by the developers of each project equipped me with programming skills that will allow me to make significant improvements to my current implementation.
Finally, I had countless discussions with junior and senior scientists during morning and afternoon tea and the dedicated networking sessions. I am returning to Vancouver with valuable career advice, new perspectives on my field and even a job offer in Europe after the conclusion of my appointment at UBC.
I thank the Faculty of Science and the Postdoctoral Fellows Office for their very generous support of my participation in SIAM CSE 2019, which stands out to me as one of the most productive conferences I have ever attended.
2019 Q2
International Liver Congress - April 2019
The oral poster I presented at the 2019 International Liver Meeting in Austria was well received, and I was able to get valuable feedback from both internationally based peers and colleagues, but also through new connections made with local peers and colleagues at this meeting. As the global viral hepatitis community is now nearing 5 years in to the 15 year timeline to achieve global viral hepatitis elimination, this was a critical meeting for me to attend. It allowed me to contextualize my research in the bigger global picture, as well as assess where we sit locally in BC and Canada with regards to research, implementation and progress towards the viral hepatitis elimination goals. This meeting provided a wake-up call to the global community, with only 6 countries world wide currently on track to achieve hepatitis C virus elimination, with Canada not one of them. Rather than be deterred by the current lack of progress towards these goals, I see this as an opportunity to improve. I came back from this meeting with many new connections, new ideas to incorporate in to my research, and new ideas to implement to translate my research in to policy and practise.
5th International Conference on Fish Telemetry - June 2019
I presented an oral presentation entitled “Individual differences from behavioral and morphological perspectives: are they linked?” at the 5th International Conference on Fish Telemetry. I combined passive acoustic telemetry with morphological data of lake trout from a small sub-Arctic lake (NWT, Canada) to ask three main questions: 1) Is there repeatability within individuals for each behavioral trait?, 2) Are there correlations between pair of traits (e.g., behavioural syndrome)?, and 3) Are there correlations between morphology and behavioral traits? While strong patterns of repeatability within individuals and correlations between pairs of behavioral traits were found, there were no correlations between morphology and behavioral traits. This presentation was also streamed live on twitter and can be found at https://www.pscp.tv/w/1OyKApdBDmbxb.
Questions and discussion that followed my presentation led to two outcomes that should impact my career positively. First, I was approached by Dr. Bolland (University of Hull, UK) to work on a similar line of questions but with another species (e.g., Atlantic salmon). Second, ideas for a new paper was generated with Dr. Power (University of Waterloo, Canada) to look at a latitudinal variation of correlations between morphology and behavioral traits within a species.
Overall, I learned international cutting edge research using telemetry to study fish ecology.
GRC/GRC Conference on Animal-Microbe Symbioses - June 2019
The UBC Science PDF Travel Award provided generous financial support for my attendance of the the 3rd Gordon Research Conference on Animal-Microbe Symbioses (Mount Snow, VT, USA). This meeting brings together an interdisciplinary and international team of researchers from the areas of biology, microbiology, ecology, medicine, and chemistry. It was also for the second time preceded by a Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) -- a meeting organized by early-career scientists for early-career scientists. My abstract ‘Exploring protist-bacteria/archaea symbioses in insect microbiomes via single-cell genomics’ was selected for a talk at the GRS and I also presented a poster at both the GRS and GRC.
Microbial eukaryotes (protists) often rely on symbiotic bacteria and archaea. Protists found in animal microbiomes also house such endosymbiotic or ectosymbiotic microbes. Not all prokaryotes detected from an animal host are thus directly associated with the animal, but some of them (and in some cases most of them) are primarily associated with its protists. Fully comprehending these complex interactions is, however, complicated because they only occur in the animal gut and cannot be cultured outside of the animal host. The work I presented showcased that combining single-cell genomics with genome-resolved metagenomics is a suitable approach for characterizing the nested complexity of animal microbiomes one cell at a time.
Gordon Research Conference for Plant Metabolic Engineering - June 2019
The Gordon Research Conference on plant metabolic engineering was a great experience, bringing together cutting edge science from metabolite and pathway discovery, metabolic engineering of production systems to actual application of products. The conference started off with a seminar for young scientists giving people ample time to talk science and network in a smaller environment before the actual conference. This also gave the opportunity for young researchers like myself to present their research as a talk. The actual conference highlighted research from established scientists in longer presentations, highlighting important areas in the field. In general the quality of presentations was high and included a lot of unpublished data. All people attending were really open to discussions and there was ample time to do so. The fact that everybody stayed at the same location, had breakfast, lunch and dinner together made networking very easy and encouraged all levels of scientists to mix, exchange ideas and talk about science and equally important about their personal career paths. The latter I found extremely valuable. Individuals were more than happy to share their career stories and give advice. In summary I found the GRS/GRC was an excellent conference for plant science but also personal development.
MiniRUEDI Symposium and the EGU General Assembly - April 2019
I had the opportunity to present oral presentations at two conferences in Europe in April 2019 thanks to the PDF Travel Award. It was my first time presenting at a conference outside of Canada and the USA. At the first conference, a small mass spectrometry symposium, I presented my research results from using a field-portable mass spectrometer to investigate the fate of fugitive natural gas released to groundwater and soil in northeast BC. I gained valuable feedback on the results that helped me to determine my publication plans for this data set. At the second conference, a large geosciences assembly with ~15000 participants, I presented my work on greenhouse gas cycling in the Canadian Arctic. It was the largest conference I have attended in 10 years and provided me with a great opportunity to share my work with a large audience, to see cutting-edge research across the geosciences, and to meet many leading researchers in Europe, who I had not previously interacted with. As a result of my experiences at these conferences I have become involved in a publication using a portable mass spectrometer to monitor denitrification in groundwater and I will be included as a coauthor on a paper that is being submitted in the coming months.
Advances in the population ecology of stream salmonids V - May 2019
With the support from the Postdoctoral Fellows Office, I was able to attend the Advances in the Population Ecology of Stream Salmonids Symposia in Granada, Spain. This meeting occurs only once every five years and brings together leading scientists across the world who specialize in the study of stream-dwelling salmon and trout ecology.
Given this specialized topic happens to be my direct study area, nearly every presentation was highly relevant to my own work and I left the meeting with my brain over-flowing with ideas. The small size of the conference allowed me to meet nearly all of the attendees and develop collaborations and friendships throughout the week. The small size of the meeting also permitted it to be arranged as a single session, such that all attendees viewed each talk. Consequently, I received excellent feedback on my oral presentation that occurred in a session entitled "Habitat and Population Dynamics".
Overall, this was one of the most useful, engaging, and interesting meetings I have had the privledge to attend. I am extremely thankful to the Postdoctoral Travel Award for making it possible for me to attend.
inVIVO Planetary Health 2019 - May 2019
I had the pleasure of attending the inVIVO Planetary Health 2019 conference in Detroit, USA, from May 15-17, 2019. The inVIVO conference is a uniquely interdisciplinary conference, bridging the fields of public health, environmental health, and social and environmental justice. The theme of the conference was “From Challenges, to Opportunities” and Detroit was the ideal location to hold such a conference. The conference brought together world-renowned researchers from the disciplines listed above, along with local public servants, community organizers, and activists from Detroit who are working across sectors to improve public and environmental health, and social and environmental justice in the city and around the world. Conference sessions included such diverse topics as urban greening and health, microbiome rewilding, food justice and nutritional ecology, and action planning for personal and planetary change. The conference offered valuable opportunities to share my research on urban greenness exposure and heat stress in an oral presentation, network with public health and greening experts in my field, and learn more about the intersection of food and environmental justice. I also had the opportunity during the conference to tour interesting grassroots projects in Detroit, such as the Earthworks Urban Farm, and learn about their work.
International Society for Autism Research - May 2019
Thanks to the PDF Travel Award I was fortunate enough to be able to attend The International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) Annual Meeting in Montreal this year. The INSAR Annual Meeting is a unique conference, where global leaders in Autism research across a multitude of disciplines congregate to share their work. What makes this conference so special is that almost every area of Autism research is represented, from clinical psychology to genetics to microbiome research. There are also multiple attendees on the spectrum who are able to give their valuable insight and guide research in a way that will yield the most benefit for themselves and others on the spectrum.
At the conference I was able to present a poster on the progress of my current research which is analysing the microbiome, metabolome, proteome and exposome of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. This is an area which is of huge interest amongst the autism community and through this presentation I was able to connect with fellow researchers and cultivate meaningful connections with potential collaborators which will be extremely beneficial in the continuation and growth of my research and most importantly, for the Autism community.
41st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals - April 2019
The Symposium of Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals (SBFC) is one of the largest global conferences for scientists who are interested in the biotechnology for fuels and chemicals area. Top researchers and industrial leaders (around 400 attendees) attend this conference from all over the world. The funding to attend this conference gave me a great opportunity to gather and discuss my recent research and helped me establish connections and network with other experts in the “bioeconomy” field.
As a result of the travel support I was able to present my work (poster session) at this prestigious meeting. As well as increasing my profile I received invaluable and useful feedback from the established experts who were at the conference. This will definitely improve my future research. In addition, as the conference covered broad topic areas, I learn a lot about other areas of research and processing integration. This has broadened my viewpoint and will help my research immeasurably.
I am really grateful that the UBC PDF travel awards allowed me to attend this conference. I suspect it will be a pivotal component of my research career and my time here at UBC. Thank you for your support of this great opportunity.
2019 Q3
American Fisheries Society - September 2019
The American Fisheries Society/ Wildlife Society Joint meeting in Reno was perhaps one of the best conferences I’ve been to. Prior to the start of the meeting, I attended a workshop on Bayesian statistical analysis that was very well conducted and attended, and I have no doubt that I will be using these techniques in an upcoming analysis. There were several sessions on Pacific Salmon, with a large number of well-published researchers, that were great to sit through. I attended several other symposia where I had good interactions with the presenters and found some potential future opportunities for collaboration. Finally, there were quite a few colleagues from my Masters at OSU who were present, so it was great to re-establish old connections. Thanks for providing funds to help make this possible.
International Research Society on Children's Literature - August 2019
IRSCL is a conference that I look forward to every 2 years. The international children's literature community is an incredibly supportive one, and it is through this conference that I have had the opportunity to receive feedback on a number of subsequent publications. This year has been very much the same! I presented on a mixture of research from my PhD as well as my current postdoctoral research project. I was able to use information provided by young readers through online surveys to support and interrogate current ways of understanding reading habits and expectations around represention of LGBTQ people in YA literature. After the presentation, I was approached by colleagues and senior researchers with a combination of congratulations and advice relating to the publication I am hoping to produce from my postdoctoral research. Aside from my own presentation, the conference provided many further opporunities of networking and experiencing the beautiful city of Stockholm. Attendees were hosted by Stockholm City Council at the historic City Hall which houses the Blue Hall, where the Nobel Prizes are handed out. The conference provided stimulating and provocative keynote speakers every morning, form all around the world, and their speeches have given me a lot to think about where my own research intersects with questions of race and representation in literature. All in all, IRSCL was a fantastic conference, and I am feeling very much inspired to continue moving forward with my postdoc.
International Congress of Mucosal Immunology - July 2019
I attended the International Congress of Mucosal Immunology (ICMI) in Brisbane, Australia from 16-20 July 2019. This meeting featured presentations by world-renowned scientists including Alexander Rudensky, Bana Jabri and Richard Locksley who provided a valuable insight into the exciting research currently being performed at the cutting-edge of my research field. The presentations also helped put my projects into context and helped stimulate new ideas. I have since discussed these new ideas with my PI and am due to progress one of these ideas to the wet lab in the near future.
In addition to the presentations, this conference also provided ample opportunities to meet likeminded scientists, network and discuss my data. This was a particularly rewarding experience, not just for the project I was presenting, but also for additional projects I am currently working on in the lab. For example, during my poster presentation, I was approached by a scientist who recognised my name from her colleague who I met at a previous conference where I presented a different project. We began discussing the additional projects I am working on as well as my potential future career directions and a collaboration is also slowly blossoming from these interactions.
As well as meeting many new people and discussing projects with scientists from around the world (particularly from the UK and Australia), I also unexpectedly bumped into a few familiar faces from my previous institute. Rekindling these relationships was a particularly rewarding experience.
Overall, I would like to thank the Faculty of Medicine and Postdoctoral Fellows Office for their kind Travel Award. It allowed me to attend a particularly interesting meeting where I could network and gather unpublished information on various aspects of my research field. I have given an update to my PI and am scheduled to disseminate this information to my lab within the next two weeks.
Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution - August 2019
I am from the U.S. and have only been in Canada for ~2 years, and this was my first time attending a Canadian society conference. Likewise, this was my first time to the Maritimes, so this conference presented itself as a great opportunity to make new research/personal connections as well as to see a new part of the world. My presentation was on rainbow trout in British Columbia, which was a part of the “Evolution” session at the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution. My presentation was well-received, and immediately after my presentation, I met three new people whom I knew by name before because of their quality research, but had not yet met in person. I am already exploring potential future collaborations with one of the people I met. I also learned quite a bit about Canadian flora and fauna in the presentations that I attended.
After the conference, I had the chance to travel in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which was a great way to follow up a productive scientific meeting!
Annual Meeting, Society of Mathematical Biology - July 2019
With the support of the PDF travel grant I attented the Annual meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology, Montreal, Canada, 2019, an important conference in my field. I am glad to have been able to attend again and am grateful for this award.
I was invited to speak at the mini-symposium themed "Interdisciplinary approaches in developmental biology", organized by the subgroup on Developmental Biology. This gave me the opportunity to share my postdoctoral research from UBC. My talk was on chemical and mechanical signaling in single and collective cell migration. These two mechanisms and their interactions play an important role in many developmental processes that require cell migration. I study this subject by means of computational models. I design multi-scale models that describe these processes in cells. This modeling approach and the biological questions I am to answer are of interest to other attendees, as shown by the questions and positive feedback from the audience. The other talks broadened my view of methods in the field and showcased how they were used to answer developmental questions. I made several new connections.
Furthermore, I attended other symposia about cell migration, intracellular dynamics and the use of models in cancer therapies.
Dr. Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent
XXV IUFRO World Congress-Forest Research and Cooperation for Sustainable Development - September 2019
The IUFRO World Congress, held every five years, is the biggest conference on forestry and forest management in the world. My participation in the XXV IUFRO World Congress provided me with the unique opportunity to present my work carried out as a postdoctoral fellow at UBC to many world-class scientists. In addition to numerous formal and informal discussions, I presented two oral presentations (one in a subplenary in front of hundreds of people) and was co-author of two additional oral presentations. I also attended many technical events in order to learn about the most innovative research being carried out at other research institutions.
During the conference, I had numerous opportunities to increase my professional network and meet with researchers to discuss potential future research collaborations. I also took part in the congress mentorship program, under which I received advice from an experienced scientist who also happens to be the incoming vice-president of IUFRO. I also participated in business meetings of different working groups and became actively involved in unit 9 of IUFRO (Forest Policy and Economics). My participation in this working group will allow me to interact with many leading scientists in my field of study and participate in innovative and ground-breaking research initiatives.
Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics - September 2019
Receiving a UBC post-doctoral fellow travel award helped enable me to attend Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) 2019 in San Francisco, California, USA. During the conference I had the opportunity to present an oral abstract titled “Tricuspid Valve-in-Valve and Bioprosthetic Surgical Tricuspid and Pulmonic Valve Degeneration: Lessons from Imaging and Histopathology” that detailed our recent work to understand mechanisms of failure in a subset of artificial heart valves. I was also able to attend an number of oral and poster presentations on similar topics of which I am a co-author.
Notably, TCT was an important conference to present this work at as it is attended by many leaders in the bioprosthetic heart valve field. Importantly, this includes fundamental scientists, engineers, allied health professionals, patients, clinicians and industry partners which help ensure knowledge translation to a diverse group of knowledge users. Furthermore, this conference gave me the opportunity to meet with current and new collaborators to provide updates on projects and make significant progress on furthering our joint work. Importantly, I also had the chance to attend networking events and including those for women in science / medicine and translational science sessions that gave me the chance to build contacts and deepen my knowledge base.
Options X for the Control of Influenza - August/September 2019
I attended the Options for the Control of Influenza Conference, a large international meeting for all aspects of influenza research, this past August in Singapore. I started the conference by attending the School of Influenza, a crash course on the past, present, and future of flu research. This provided a fantastic overview and allowed me to get the most out of the next 5 days of the conference. Options is a premier conference for flu research so I heard many talks from leaders in the field and learned about a huge diversity of research areas. I presented my own research, “Improving avian influenza surveillance through wetland sampling”, as an oral presentation on the final day and received a lot of valuable feedback and positive reactions from researchers interested in our study. Options was a great opportunity to learn about many new aspects of flu and to showcase our study to the international flu research field.
2019 Q4
Kids Brain Health Network Conference - December 2019
With the help of the Faculty of Medicine Travel award, I was able to attend the Kids Brain Health Network (KBHN) Conference in Ottawa. At the conference I presented our poster, “Everyday Executive Function Associated with Adaptive Functioning in Children and Adolescents with Prenatal Alcohol Exposure”. Our poster was selected to be part of the Lightning Talk sessions, so I presented a three minute summary of the poster to the entire conference audience. There was a lot of interest in the poster from researchers and clinicians, so it was an excellent opportunity to share results of the study. On the last day of the conference I also presented a three minute summary of a KBHN research policy brief I had written on increasing the support for individuals with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), which was part of a policy forum titled “Breaking down barriers: Informing policy through research”. This conference was a great networking opportunity as I was able to meet some of the researchers and clinicians in person that have contributed to our study, in addition to meeting family members of those with neurodevelopmental disabilities.
European Association of Nuclear Medicine - October 2019
The annual meeting of EANM’19 is the leading international conference in the field and is an important occasion for scientists and clinicians to present and discuss the findings of their research. EANM is a non-profit scientific and professional organization dedicated to advancing science, technology, and practical application of nuclear medicine, molecular imaging, and radionuclide therapy. EANM has arranged for many internationally renowned cancer researchers to serve as plenary session speakers. These professors and scientists are experts in their respective fields of study and are held in high regard by the cancer research community.
For this conference, I have presented three abstracts as oral or posters about developing novel radiopharmaceuticals for prostate cancer therapy. After the presentations, I have received several good comments and questions. It was pleasure having the chance to exchange and discuss information/knowledge with other cancer researchers. During the conference, there was a plenary session impressed me which also related to my work. The talks were well organized and summarized the radiotracers or radiopharmaceuticals for prostate cancer therapy in recently clinic studies. I appreciate having the opportunity to showcase our findings at this important international conference and to demonstrate Canadian commitment in advancing cancer research.
Canadian Cancer Research Conference - November 2019
I attended the 5th Canadian Cancer Research Conference in Ottawa on November 3rd – 5th 2019. This conference is bi-annual and is one of the largest conferences dedicated to cancer research in Canada with many leading research scientists in attendance presenting plenary lectures. This conference enables the Canadian cancer research community to congregate and learn about new developments in cancer research in Canada. The conference is unique with its important involvement of cancer patient advocates who were paired with scientific mentors during the meeting. During the conference I attended sessions that covered topics such as cancer metastasis, resistance to therapy, immunology, genomics, precision oncology and microbiome. There were two poster sessions in which I presented my research and discussed our optimization of an emerging technology that could eventually be used in applications such as cancer diagnostics. The conference was informative and I broadened my knowledge by learning about diverse fields of research that were different to my own. I used the opportunity to network, present my research, learn off others, help others in their work, form new collaborations and formulate new research ideas. I am grateful of the UBC postdoctoral travel award that supported my attendance at this meeting.
Epigenomics of Common Diseases - November 2019
The Postdoctoral travel award generously supported my travel to attend the prestigious Epigenomics of common diseases conference in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK. This conference covers a broad spectrum of epigenomics discoveries and challenges during development and diseases. Various scientists from experimental and computational epigenomics background discussed latest developments in the field. I gave a short talk and also presented by poster highlighting the role of transcription factors in shaping the epigenetic landscape during liver development and diseases. I was able to convenience the scientific community that the transcription factors are capable of establishing and maintaining the epigenetic status at gene regulatory elements by their interactions and recruitment of epigenetic modifiers to these elements. I also won the best poster presentation award at the conference. Overall, the conference was a great experience as it provided me with a chance to present my work at international meeting and to learn about new developments in other relevant areas in the field of epigenetics. It also offered me the opportunity to network with many leading scientists. I would like to
thank the Faculty of Medicine and the Postdoctoral Fellows Office for the opportunity to attend this conference.
SciX 2019 Conference - October 2019
SciX 2019 was held between October 13th and 18th at the Palm Springs Convention Center in Palm Springs, CA. My attendance in the conference was with the international scientific community. One of the main reasons of my attendance was not only to be informed on the recent advances in vibrational spectroscopy, but also to discuss my research project with a wider audience. My oral presentation, titled "Study of Red Cell Concentrate supernatant for the non-invasive assessment of storage-related changes using deep Raman spectroscopy'', was part of the ‘’Vibrational spectroscopy: Toward clinical applications’’ session. During the talk, I presented my recent work on the application of Spatially-Offset Raman Spectroscopy (SORS) for blood component quality assessment, focusing on the development of a protocol for the non-invasive quality assessment for transfusion of stored human RBC units. The results were recently published in Applied Spectroscopy (2020). Some more features that turned SciX into a valuable experience were the social events providing an excellent chance for networking with the scientific community, and the poster sessions outlining research in various analytical fields. I would like to thank the PDFO, the Faculty of Science and the Michael Smith Laboratories for financially supporting my attendance to SciX 2019.