Conference Photo-blogging

Greetings from the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC! Quick plug: SfN has a number of resources for the non-scientist. You should check them out. The Brain Facts primer is particularly good; I picked up a copy of this free resource at the meeting. Very slick!

This year is the 35th annual shindig of our organization, and from what I understand our turnout topped 30,000! To get a sense of what 30,000 neuroscientists look like, I took a picture:

Click below to see 'em



Of course that isn't all of them. The two rows you can see are posters RR-1 to RR-65, SS-1 to SS-96, and TT-1 to TT-36. Keep in mind that there are rows A to YY, and any given row has 30-96 posters in it (depending on the layout). Then consider that there are two poster sessions per day, so each position has 2 posters on it per day for 5 days and, well... that's a lot of freakin' presentations! Doesn't even take into account panels, symposia, or slide presentations!

I tried to get a perspective shot so you could see the immensity of the convention center.



All those booths are vendors from different companies (about 1300 this year) peddling their research wares. The poster aisles wrap around the back and sides of the vendors.

I also ran into some old friends and compatriots. For example, there's Lesley, aka "Hooch" who went to my undergrad alma mater and worked in the same lab.



Here's Christa and Joe, a couple of Canadians who regularly imbibe with me (but not this year):



Christa is the one with the sideburns. Ok not really. Canadians aren't that weird. :)

All and all, it was a good meeting. I spent my time learning about transgenic mice since I will be working with them in the very near future. Next year... Atlanta!