For the last four days I was in Boston for the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Microbe 2016 meeting.  The meeting is held in Boston on even years, and New Orleans on odd. 

The conference brings together all sorts of microbiologists: from earth sciences, to host-associated, to clinical pathologists and epidemiologists, to educators.  This year, there were reportedly over 11,000 participants! Because of the wide variety of topics, there is always an interesting lecture going on related to your topic, and it was a wonderful experience to be able to talk directly to other researchers to learn about the clever techniques they are using.  I posted about a tiny fraction of those interesting projects on Give Me The Short Version.

On Sunday, I presented a poster on “Farming Systems Modify The Impact Of Inoculum On Soil Microbial Diversity.”  I analyzed the data from this project for the Menalled Lab last year, and it has developed into a manuscript in review, as well as several additional projects in development.

One of the best parts of ASM meetings is that you never know who you are going to run into, and I was able to meet up with several friends and colleagues, including Dr. Benoit St-Pierre, who was a post-doc in the Wright lab at the University of Vermont while I was a student, and Laura Cersosimo, the other Ph.D. candidate from the UVM Wright lab who will be defending in just a few months!  I also ran into Ph.D. candidate Robert Mugabi, who is hoping to defend by March and in the Barlow lab at UVM while I was there.  Most unexpectedly, I ran into a A Lost Microbiologist who had wandered in from Norway: Dr. Nicole Podnecky, who I met at UVM back when we were undergraduates!

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Of course, no conference would be complete without vendor swag.

Vendor swag! And not even all of it…

Ice cream made using liquid nitrogen from the Witches of Boston.