Monday started for me with the lecture on the navigation systems underlying the migration of monarch butterflies by Steven Reppert. The topic was way cool and very much along the lines of neuroethological studies that I love: for instance, they painted one antenna of the butterflies black to prevent entrainment of its clock to daylight, but left the… Read More Monday at SfN
Sunday afternoon was packed with cool stuff – of course all going on at the same time! I split my time such that I started looking at some vestibular posters, but then went to a mini-symposium on Behavioral diversity in individuals: genetiv and circuit mechanisms. I heard three talks, and the one I liked best… Read More Sunday highlights
I very much enjoyed last night’s presidential lecutre. I’ll start with the non-content-related reasons: Bargmann’s delivery had a nice but not overwhelming pace, and the same can be said for her slides: thankfully no information overload, but helpful pointers supporting what she said. She very clearly acknowledged the people inside (and outside) her lab who… Read More Cori Bargmann’s presidential lecture
My SfN experience this year started by being thoroughly confused – it took me way too long to find the room in which the professional development workshop on careers away from the bench had already started. I blame it on bad signposting… The session itself included some personal anectodes on the importance of networking, honest answers about salaries,… Read More Arriving and delving in
Made it safely to Chicago after a 9h flight! The time was nicely divided between watching movies, watching some ‘classes’ for the online computer science course I am doing, and chatting to my neighbour, who is from the same grad school. Even before boarding, the usual poster roll spotting started, along the lines of ‘that… Read More Getting there
Finally, I sent off the poster to be printed – so slowly but surely I feel ready for the SfN! In addition to the poster, I also got some business cards printed, so I can give away something when standing in front of the poster. Come by if you want one 😉 Even more exciting is… Read More Preparing for the SfN
After giving my first talk at a conference, it’s now poster season. And despite some poster-making and presenting experience, it turns out that both posters that I have been working on have in some aspects been a first. Poster number one is already printed and presented, at a brief meeting organised for/by the collaborative research center 870.… Read More Poster season
Recently I managed to sneak in some non-fiction and non-paper reading – books about science geared towards the general public. I’d like to share my thoughts about these books with you, and will start with Michael Nielsen’s book ‘Reinventing discovery: The new era of networked science’. In short, Nielsen argues that in the age of… Read More Reading Michael Nielsen’s ‘Reinventing Discovery’
I went to yet another doctoral student conference – the NeuroDoWo (Neuroscience Doctoral Student Workshop), which was held in Cologne this year. For the first time, I travelled to a conference without a poster roll, but with a powerpoint on my laptop. I had decided to present a fairly complex but pretty cool experiment, for… Read More Giving my first conference talk
The model animal I work with is the tadpole of Xenopus laevis, the South African Clawed frog. It has been a model system for developmental biology for a long time, so let’s look at the development: [wpvideo 4NkVSztR] Credit: BBC iWonder Though most developmental biologists work with developmental stages that are even smaller and younger… Read More A frog as a pregnancy test