Runa Reuter
Report of GLOMAR PhD student Runa Reuter about her participation in the "The Micropaleontology Society annual Conference (TMS)" in Southampton, UK from 15 to 17 November 2023
The Micropaleontological Society Annual Conference 2023 was hosted by the National Oceanography Centre and the University of Southampton from 15th to 17th November 2023, bridging the gap between microfossil groups, environmental systems and micropaleontologists from all over the world.
After a warm welcome by the organizers (and a beautiful pair of socks with printed microfossils on them that each attendee received) the conference started with a selection of workshops. I participated in a workshop led by Prof. Peter Bijl from Utrecht University, who introduced the platforms palsys.org and DINOSTRAT to us. Beside gaining an insight in excellent databases the workshop offered a platform to talk to other scientists interested in dinoflagellate research, and for me personally having the chance to talk to the organizer of the workshop was a special moment because I am following his research with great interest since some years, but I never met him in person before.
The following two days were filled with a selection of presentations, covering the whole range of micropaleontological research topics and career stages, and two poster sessions, which offered enough time to have a look at each poster and to talk to the presenters. I presented the results of micro-Fourir transform infrared analysis of Stelladinium stellatum cyst walls in a 12-minute talk, providing insights on the effect of early diagenetic processes on the spectrochemical composition of a degradation sensitive organic particle during transport through the water column and the deposition in surface sediments under different oxygen concentrations. A few days after the conference I received valuable feedback via a student/ECR evaluation sheet which was filled out by one of the keynote speakers, and which will help me to improve future presentations.
Attending the Micropaleontological Society Annual Conference 2023 was a great experience, and beside interesting insights in various micropaleontological research topics, I was especially happy to meet two friends from Urbino again, who are doing their PhDs at the National Oceanography Centre and who showed me around the city and their labs.