The Lisa Walker Travel Grant enabled me to attend the 2017 Gordon Research Conference on Physical Virology in Barga, Italy. This conference emphasizes networking and I was able to meet researchers from all over the world who work in my field, none of whom I had met at the two previous conferences I attended (AIChE and ASV). My work is fairly interdisciplinary which can make it hard to get helpful feedback. Not only did this conference allow me to get a lot of feedback on my work, I also came away with many new ideas for research to explore during my PhD and beyond. There were several professors I met at the conference that I would be interested in completing a post-doc with. Many of them said they only hire postdocs they have networked with in person, so without this conference those opportunities would have remained closed to me. I was selected as one of the student chairs for the next conference; chairing a conference is a great professional development opportunity and an important step towards achieving my goal of becoming a professor.
-Lakshmi Nathan, Daniel Group
Graduate students and post docs from the US, UK, Switzerland, and Spain