Julia Gensel

The International Meeting on Organic Geochemistry (IMOG 2019) was held at the Gothia Towers in Gothenburg, Sweden from 01 September to 06 September 2019. The IMOG is the largest meeting on Organic Geochemistry with international participants from academia and industry.

The presentation of the state-of-the-art of the ongoing research is achieved through both oral presentations (plenary talks and split session with the opportunity to switch in between) and poster presentations. For me, the talks enabled a broadening and deepening of my knowledge regarding the partly diverse field of organic geochemistry. I was also attracted by some specific talks (e.g. “Refinement of isotopic fractionation in plants: a new insight into physiological response to dry-wet conditions” by Fan et al. or “A novel proxy based on archaeal lipids for tropical terrestrial temperatures in ancient greenhouse climates” by Blewett et al.) which on the one hand gave me new insights in my current research as they were content-related and on the other hand gave me new ideas of how I could proceed with my PhD project. A lot of talks also referred to one or multiple papers I now consider to read in more detail to expand my knowledge of the specific literature.

The poster presentation where I contributed by presenting my poster titled “Understanding the fate of plant wax derived n-alkanes in subtropical wetland systems: the Mkhuze Swamps” offered a great opportunity of more in-depth discussions of topics closely connected to my research, and I got lots of valuable advice and ideas.

Last but not least a conference is also a very important place for networking. The well-organized structure of joined coffee/lunch breaks, the technical program itself, and the cultural and social activities made this very easy. I now not only know some faces of the who’s who I am citing but I also established new contacts with people at the PhD or Postdoc level as well as refreshed contacts with people I already met on other occasions.

Finally, I took home a variety of great new impressions, and probably most important, a very inspired and motivated feeling to enthusiastically proceed my PhD work now and therefore I am very grateful to GLOMAR for having enabled the attending of IMOG2019 by providing financial support.