Elliot Imler Conference Summary

Elliot Imler Conference Summary

Elliot Imler

Ph.D. Candidate
Neuroscience GIDP

Conference Summary
Drosophila Neurobiology
Cold Spring Harbor, New York
September 30th-October 4th 2015

With help from the Herber E. Carter Travel award I recently attended the 2015 Drosophila Neurobiology Meeting at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This was without question the most important scientific meeting of my career thus far. The meeting was a focused gathering of several hundred researchers in my specific subfield and included nearly all of my potential future employers.

This year I had the fortune of being selected to give a featured talk on my research. There are a limited number of openings to speak at the conference, which are decided from abstracts alone. The talks are given in front of the entirety of the conference attendees in a packed auditorium, so it was incredible opportunity to gain recognition within this small community, as well as high pressure experience.

With a considerable amount of preparation and anxiety my talk went over extremely well. I received a lot of very useful feedback from audience questions as well as discussion after the talk. Many people said they were very impressed by both the work and the presentation and have given me offers to interview in their lab, some of which I had not considered before the meeting. This was especially important due to my delayed publication record which may have severely hindered my job search if not for the experience of giving a talk at a major meeting.

The meeting also gave me an opportunity to meet a number of lab heads which I had been previously interested in working with. Combined with the talk these face to face interactions may turn out to be a critical part of my future job hunt. In fact, these discussions have already had an impact on where I would like to take my career and have helped to focus my eventual job search.

Oh yeah, and there was some really impressive science presented too. The Drosophila Neurobiology meeting was previously my favorite scientific meeting and it lived up to those expectations again this year. I can’t think of another meeting where nearly every talk is relevant and also novel. Most meetings are a rehash of already published work due to an unhealthy paranoia about results being scooped to publication, but this meeting is a notable exception. Due to a combination of community trust and tight control of presented materials people are more open to present unpublished data and discuss preliminary findings. This has a huge effect on the speed of scientific progress and the ease of forming collaborations between what might otherwise be competitors, and it makes me very proud to be a part of such a collegial field.

Overall this was an incredibly rewarding and career enriching conference experience and I would like to thank the Carter award for helping make that possible.