7  Conferences

Attending conferences is an important part of academic life and a valuable opportunity to share your work, receive feedback, and engage with the broader scientific community. Travel to conferences is dependent on our lab budget and may vary from year to year. In general, the requirement to represent out lab at an academic conference is that your project is sufficiently developed to be presented as a poster or a talk. We will make this decision together.

As a lab, we typically attend SCAPPS and NCM. SCAPPS is our home conference, and we attend it every year. NCM is an international conference that we generally attend every other year, depending on interest, relevance, and lab budget. Other conferences we have attended in the past include NASPSPA and SfN. If there is a different meeting you would like to attend, please bring it to my attention so we can discuss whether it is a good fit and whether there is room in the lab budget to support it. As a general rule, graduate students can expect to present completed work at one major conference per year.

To be eligible for conference travel, you must show me a first draft of your abstract at least 2 weeks in advance of the submission deadline and your final draft at least 1 week before the deadline. This allows time for multiple rounds of feedback and revisions from myself and any other collaborators. If you do not meet this timeline, you will not be eligible to attend the conference.

If your submission is accepted, your poster or talk must be completed at least 2 weeks before we leave for the conference. This ensures there is sufficient time to give practice presentations to the lab and make any necessary adjustments. Presenting your work clearly and confidently is a skill that takes time to develop, and our lab group provides a supportive environment for rehearsing and receiving feedback.

Travel funding for graduate students is also available through our Department, provided you meet the attendance requirement for the Departmental Seminar Series. Meeting this attendance requirement is mandatory in this lab. Failure to do so will result in either missing out on conference travel or being responsible for covering the department travel award amount out of pocket. In all cases, you must submit your travel and expense pre-approval form to our graduate program administrator well in advance of any deadlines. Travel approvals and reimbursements are not guaranteed without prior authorization. Additional details can be found in the Graduate Student Handbook.