Society for General Microbiology Conference - Spring 2011

This report comes from Zoonotica (@_zoonotica_ on twitter) - who spent last week at the Society for general microbiology conference, hearing about life in the world under the microscope. The Society holds two conferences a year, and they are both highly recommended.

Name: Zoonotica
Location: Harrogate, UK
Date: 14th April, final day of the SGM conference

The Society for General Microbiology (SGM) held its Spring Conference in Harrogate this year and I was lucky enough to be able to attend (with many thanks to the SGM for the grant that helped cover my costs).

The night before the conference started there was a networking workshop for early-career delegates. It involved a brief talk about ‘elevator pitches', a few games (including ‘networking bingo' - a game which worked so well that nobody fully completed it because we were too busy chatting to each other) and was topped off with dinner and lots of sweets! This was a great opportunity to learn how to make the most of the conference (especially useful for people, like me, for whom this was their first scientific conference) and, equally importantly, a brilliant way to meet new people at a similar stage in their careers. It meant that throughout the rest of the conference there would always be somebody whose name I knew and who I felt confident enough to chat to.

On the Monday the conference started in full with a host of sessions including "Seeing the cell through the ‘eyes' of the virus"; "Maths and Microbes"; "Vaccines"; "Food Biosecurity" and "Meningitis". The sessions included invited speakers and researchers who had submitted an abstract and had been asked to give a talk on it rather than produce a poster. The talks were all excellent and were pitched well so that both people very familiar with the subject and those much less so were able to learn something from them. There were also three lectures given by the SGM prizewinners: the SGM Prize Medal was awarded to David Hopwood, the Flemming Prize was awarded to Peter Cherepanov and the Colworth Prize was awarded to George Salmond.The Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday events culminated in the evenings with poster viewing sessions. With twenty-two different categories for posters there were certainly a lot to look round and it was a great way to learn more about bugs and the methods used to study them. (This was also another place the networking session came in useful as some lovely people I met at it took pity on me when I was standing alone in front of my poster and came and chatted to me about it!)

Overall it was an excellent conference. My only regret was that there were so many interesting talks on that I didn't manage to make much of the "Working with the media" session. However, I heard via Twitter that a podcast of the session will be available online so I am keeping my eye out for that...

If you're a microbiologist considering attending a conference I would definitely recommend an SGM one (the next SGM conference is taking place in September in York - check out their website to see if you are eligible for a grant to cover travel costs etc.). Even if you can't attend that one, I would definitely encourage you to go to any other conference - you get to learn loads, make new friends, and speaking in detail and at length about your exciting research is a lot better received there than when you try to do the same with your family and non-sciency friends!