SSBE Conference in Lausanne

Last week (Sept 1-2) I was in Lausanne for a work conference. It was the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering Annual Meeting, and almost everyone (about 15 people) from my office attended (my boss is the president of the society). For the conference I had to prepare a poster about "The Reproducibility of Trabecular Bone Analysis of Lumbar Vertebrae of Two Inbred Strains of Mice". Sounds pretty fancy eh? It's about a study that was done before I got here, by Josh (my predecessor) and some others, and the responsibility got handed over the me. The interesting part is, although Josh mentioned that I might have to present something, nobody officially informed me that I would have a part in the conference. Only when I saw my name in the program and asked did they say "Oh ya, you are making and presenting a poster". Ah, what!?!? Lol, actually it was pretty easy to make, because we have a set design (damn, I didn't get to break out the poster board and felts and glitter) and about half the information was already compiled into an abstract (written by Josh). I had to make some more tables and images and then add to the writing and voila! I go the beautiful poster you see below:


Alright, so I arrived in Lausanne Thursday morning (after a few morning fiascos...but it all worked out in the end ;) ) and watched some presentations. After a tasty lunch there were more presentations and then we got to the poster bit. There were 37 poster each day, and each person had to give a 2 minute speal (accompanied with a couple power point slides) about what their study was. I had planned out what I was going to say (earlier that day) and was feeling pretty confident, despite my dislike of public speaking. Unfortunately once I was standing up there with the mike I got really nervous, and then nervous about being nervous...etc. In the end it went ok, but I could have done better. Oh well, it was over at least.






Me giving my presentation.









The funniest part about the poster presentations is that they scheduled 37 two minute talks into one hour. Hmmmm, now I know it's been a few months since I have had to do complex math, but I'm pretty sure that that doesn't add up. And of course almost everybody talked for longer than 2 minutes (not me though! That was my one success) so it went way too long. This wasn't really a big deal, but the guy organizing the presenters sure thought it was. It was very entertaining watching him constantly checking his watch, and urging the next presenter to start walking over to the mike stand before the previous presenter had even finished talking (he did this to me...maybe I can blame my nervousness on that dude). Another funny part about the presentations was that about halfway through the presenters somebody said at the end "Please come see my poster later this afternoon". So of course after that everybody had to say it. Some people started adding in what there poster number was, and then everybody started saying that too. This did nothing but add to the length of the presentations (I'm sure the scheduler was not pleased, lol).

Alright, enough about the things I found entertaining that nobody cares about. After the presentations everybody got an hour and a half (minus the time the presentations had run over) to wander around and actually view the posters, and ask questions to the presenter. This was pretty informal, and most people just took advantage of the coffee and snacks (yay!!) and socialized. I stood by my poster for awhile, but the only people who came and talked to me were people from my group, mostly just trying to think of questions to make me answer (haha). I checked out some of the other posters too, some were pretty cool.





Poster viewing / discussion time. Aka, free snacks (woot!)













Me and my poster!














Cool looking pic of some of us leaving the conference. We look like a gang or something (an office gang obviously).

Harry, Martin, Henri, Samuela, Kathryn, me, Duncan





Alright, let's jump ahead to the evening. We left the conference and went to drop off our bags at the hotel (staying in a hotel, what an uncommon luxury!). We then headed over to the bbq dinner by the lake. It was really fun, lots of great things to eat and drink. It was a beautiful evening, and it was fun hanging out with my coworkers, who I normally don't see outside of work. After dinner, Samuela took some of us (me, Romain, Ralph (my boss), Thomas, Martin, Henri) out to some nearby bars. She went to university in Lausanne so had friends in the city, who we met some of. It was fun, and we got back late to the hotel to sleep.





Susanne, Duncan, Doro , me and Stefan eating dinner.












View of Lake Geneva










The second day of the conference was similar to the first day, except I didn't have to present anything (hooray!). The highlight of the day were the poster awards. We all made bets about which 2 of the 64 posters were going to win (I'm not really sure what the criteria was, but I bet on the guy that had a video of him falling in his presentation). And.....my poster won! Haha, no, I'm just kidding (did you believe me?). Stefan from our group did win one of the awards though, congrats to him! And, somehow, the two winners were ones that Tom and Samuela had bet on, so we all had to cough up 5CHF. (Though, Tom was the one who organized the bet, so it's a little suspicious...haha, jk). After that, everyone headed home on the train, but I stuck around in Lausanne because I was staying in the area for the weekend....to be continued in the next post!

Thanks to Phil (my officemate from Vancouver) for all the conference pics!