First Biology Conference

Last week I went to my first biology conference, Systems Biology of Human Diseases, held at Harvard Medical School. It was definitely different from the computer science conferences I have been to thus far. Of course, for me the biggest difference was that I was surrounded by people that were experts in a completely different field from mine, but yet were still working on some similar problems. We just happen to have very different vocabularies. Overall though, I think it was a worthwhile conference to attend. I learned some new keywords, learned more about how biologists describe cancer, and got some new ideas for how to present and do my research. Not bad for a day's worth of time. Unfortunately I couldn't stay through the poster session thanks to a migraine, so hopefully next time I won't have that problem. Luckily this conference will be in Boston again next year before they merge with a European conference, so I will have easy access for at least that year. After that we will have to decide if it is worth traveling to Europe for it.