Debbie Chen Conference Summary

Debbie Chen Conference Summary

     

Debbie Chen

Ph.D. Student
Genetics GIDP

Conference Summary
American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting
Baltimore, Maryland
October 6-10, 2015

From October 6, 2015 to October 10, 2015, I attended the American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Located at the Baltimore Convention Center near the famous Inner Harbor, I was able to re-connect with researchers related to my field and explore new developments in genetics research, reminding me again why I entered the field of genetics in the first place.

This year’s ASHG conference was especially exciting to me because I presented a poster on my work at a conference for the first time, and was able to meet with other researchers who work on projects very similar to my own. Drs. Heather Mefford and Miriam Meisler, both renowned in the field of epilepsy genetics, moderated a collection of talks that was very targeted towards my research interests. Much of the content featured data that were currently in review or otherwise unpublished, so I felt quite privileged to hear about these studies in advance.

Later in the week while I was presenting my poster, I was able to talk with researchers from Chicago, Kentucky, and even Australia about my work. In addition to sharing what they were working on, they provided valuable feedback on my experiment designs and provided suggestions on how I should continue to proceed.

While only one day of talks were directly relevant to my research, the talks on other days also piqued my interest and gave me an overall picture on how the field of genetics was progressing. For example, I attended a controversial talk that described a method of using epigenetics to predict the sexual orientation of twins and another one that gave an update on the twin astronaut study led by NASA. While there were some population genetics talks, there appeared to be a greater emphasis on disease-oriented research, especially in regards to epigenetics. Whether this is simply a cycle of “fads” in research or a marked shift in paradigm and funding remains to be seen. I look forward to finding out in future conferences.