The official AEESP 2019 conference started as most do, with breakfast, badges, and brief reunions. Although no one can deny the line was a bit long, this is not a wholly bad thing. I forget the exact number, but the evening business meeting let us know just how much our ranks have grown. Besides, it gave us more time to chat with familiar faces and meet new colleagues. I’m enjoying the somewhat whimsical badge flags, such as “Wanna be postdoc” and “Talk to me.”
A side note on the breakfast. Does anyone else ever wonder if we’re part of some experiment to see how many people choose healthy, nourishing fruit over nutella filled bearclaws?
I’m also proud that our badges this year are sporting preferred pronoun stickers. Between that, support for breastfeeding (indeed support for families, I saw more than one small toddler in tow), and the revelation that our field is leading the engineering disciplines in gender equity, it feels like we’re at least headed in the right direction towards inclusiveness. Jim Holway was exactly right in the plenary when he posited that relationships built on shared, acknowledged values are one of the best ways we have of solving our problems.
The ‘omics workshop was great. Apart from being exposed to plenty of new tools and developments in the field, I really enjoyed that fully 2/3rds of the session was about what to do after initial observations from things like metagenomic and 16S surveys. One thing I’ve been harping about is that ‘omics has to move beyond ecological “stamp collecting” and so much of the content today was exactly on how to do that. I was also happy to see a whole talk devoted to reproducible research; it’s the first one I’ve been to where version control (i.e. github) was featured as a topic and not just incidentally shown in a url.
In fact, there’s a whole lot of embracing technology going on (we see in 4D, after all). For example, as I take breaks from drafting this, I’m reading a poster preview (and playing with the data!). Thanks to Juliet Johnston for taking the time to put her data online.
As for the desert botanical garden, what can I say? We’ve got our share of nice botanical spots in Raleigh, and I’ve been to a bunch all up and down the east coast. Our local arboretum even has a xeriscape area. But nothing beats seeing a completely different biome up close. I had no idea there were so many cacti, nor how many things bloom here. And, of course, how could you not enjoy the opportunity to hunt for fluorescing scorpions!
Amongst the foliage were plenty of people whose work I follow and even interact with, but, sadly, only get to see face to face at conferences. It was delightful to reconnect in person with so many of you all tonight.