Evolution in Portland

So clearly this blog thing didn't really take. But no time like the present to try again? I'm off tomorrow for Portland for the Evolution Meeting. The last time I was at the Evolution meeting was when it was the super meeting in Ottawa in 2012. That was a crazy time for me, I defended my PhD thesis about 10 days afterwards! It was also the meeting where I presented the culmination of five years of really hard PhD work and was (co-)awarded the Hamilton award for best student talk.

As a postdoc I have been focused really heavily on learning as much cellular, molecular and fungal biology as possible, and so have purposefully attended meetings where I could advance that knowledge. Last fall I was feeling pretty down and isolated and decided that I wanted to go back to Evolution to 'come home'. The Evolution Meetings played a huge role in my graduate experience. The Evolution meeting in Fort Collins Colorado (in 2004!) was my first real science meeting. I completely remember how awed I was that so many people studied evolution. I've volunteered to serve as a peer mentor to two undergraduate students and I'm really looking forward to reliving that experience through them.

I'm also really excited about my talk (Sunday morning, 9am in the Convergent/Parallel Evolution session in the Oregon Ballroom). I'm going to be presenting on work that I started in my first year of graduate school and have been slowly working on ever since. It's also what I presented at the Evolution Meeting in Alaska in 2005, my first meeting talk! And for the first time in awhile, my talk is finished before I get on the airplane. Win!