Conferences

Generally, all students in their second year or later and postdocs should plan to present their work at a minimum of one conference per year. Additional conferences are dependent on various factors such as publishing progress, career goals, or topic of particular meetings.

Be proactive in identifying conferences of interest to you. Most conferences close their call for abstracts in the semester before the meeting. If you are interested in presenting at a conference, let me know well before this deadline and send your conference abstract to me for review no less than 2 weeks before the submission deadline.

When preparing for a conference presentation, slides for an oral presentation or your poster should be sent to me for review no less than 1 month before the meeting. For oral presentations, you should also plan to practice your talk for feedback during an upcoming group meeting.

When traveling to conferences, remember that you are representing yourself, our lab group, and Purdue. I expect that you will represent us professionally.

Use your time at conferences to build your network and your career. When you travel to a conference, you should be meeting and spending time with researchers external to our group/department/school. We see each other all the time; you can have lunch together when you get back. Engaging at conferences is a phenomenal opportunity for you to immerse yourself in the broader scientific community. The materials/biomaterials community is full of incredible people, and the people you meet at conferences could become your future colleague, mentor, boss, or lifelong research friend.

• Relatedly - meet your heroes! I still get blown away when I meet a “big name” whose work I’ve followed for years and find out that they have been following mine as well. Some of my biggest science heroes have also become some of my best mentors and collaborators. If we are attending a particular conference together, I am happy to introduce you to anyone you want to meet, but you should always feel empowered to say hi to someone new and let them know you admire their work!