Month: October 2020

Last week I “attended” another virtual conference, this time a Science & Innovation meeting held by EMCR’s for EMCR’s (Early/Mid-Career Researchers) with a strong focus on multidisciplinary collaboration across local institutions, called BLiSS*Adelaide.

The organisers did a great job pivoting and adapting to an online format, with sessions spread over four mornings throughout the week. This was some well-thought through scheduling to avoid Zoom-fatigue! The opening keynote was delivered by Dr Cathy Foley, Chief Scientist at CSIRO, and there was an engaging program of speakers each day as well as networking opportunities via “breakout rooms”.

Delegates were able to present their research via short 3-minute pre-recorded “Science Bites” and my contribution was called “Powerful Imaging Techniques for Palaeontology”. I am pleased to announce that I was awarded the Best Science Bites Presentation (People’s Choice – Lights, Camera, Action!) at the BLiSS*Adelaide 2020 Virtual Conference!

Many thanks to all who voted for my presentation, and thanks to the organisers and sponsors of the event which enabled such a great event to go ahead.

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) is an educational and scientific society that holds an annual meeting each year (you may remember my visit to SVP in Brisbane last year). The SVP conference is usually the largest collection (accumulation?) of vertebrate palaeontologists and was due to be held in Cincinnati this year for it’s 80th iteration. Alas, as we well know, 2020 has not gone to anyone’s plan and so for the first time in it’s history, SVP went fully virtual!

I was honoured to be invited to participate in a special symposium “Frontiers in Paleoneurology and Neurosensory Evolution” convened by Alan Turner & Amy Balanoff. My talk was entitled “Brain-braincase relationships across the fish-tetrapod transition” and provided me with a great opportunity to show some recent work myself and colleagues have been doing on the brains of living fish and salamanders, as well as some braincases of ~340-375 million year old tetrapod-like fossil fish.

The conference organisers have done an amazing job adapting to the virtual format and accommodating scientists from across the globe in almost every conceivable time zone. We were able to watch pre-recorded presentations in our own time, but then there were live Q&A sessions attached to each theme.

It’s been really wonderful to be able to participate in this meeting during a year when large gatherings and overseas travel seem but a distant memory, but sharing our work and speaking with other scientists remains vital for continued sharing of knowledge and the overall advancement of our field.