Last week it was time for the yearly PhD student conference BLAM. Like every year before, the weather was great, nearly like summer. It’s fortunate that the talks were so good, otherwise no one would go inside after the coffee.
The conference was two days, both Thursday and Friday. Each day started with an invited plenary speaker. Thursday morning Brendan Bohannan from Univerity of Oregon started with a talk about host-microbe systems. Julia Fisher from Georg-August-University in Göttingen talked about social systems in baboons on Friday. The rest were up the PhD students.
Besides the normal talks and the posters, there was a new talk form this year – flash talks. A flash talk is a 3-minute-long talk to present a research idea. I am impressed how well the talkers did this.
The prize for the best flash talk went to Xi Huang. The best poster prize was shared between Jerker Vinterstare and Kajsa Warfvinge. And Úna Eriksson got the best talk prize.
There were also workshops about Science and Society, Life after PhD, 3 min presentation and poster presentation. The first day the workshops were more theoretical and the second day more practical. The seniors did a one minute presentation of a poster.
New for this year was the quiz at the Thursday mingle instead of the usual group preparations for the dinner performance. The mingle sandwiches were also a new element.
And as always, BLAM ended with an amazing dinner, this year in Pelarsalen. The olnly drawback was that we were not allowed to drink the water due to new bacteria.
Thank you for great organization, talks, posters, and a really good time!
You find more photos at Flickr.
Text and photo by Inger Ekström (except the ones with me and Anne at Flickr, they are taken by Ola Olsson)
