Sandra Petrov
Report of GLOMAR PhD student Sandra Petrov about her participation in the International Symposium on Microbial Ecology 2018 in Leipzig, Germany from 12 to 17 August 2018
From 12. to 17. 08. 2018 I participated the ISME conference (International Symposium on Microbial Ecology). 2200 people from all over the world gathered in the congress centre of the city Leipzig. Twenty six morning and twenty six afternoon sessions with many different topics were offered over the week and I applied to present my poster in the session “Marine Microbiology”.
On the second day (Monday) afternoon I presented my poster in the poster session from 14:30 to 17:30. Approximately 10 people came to my poster and I had great discussions about my scientific approach. They were interested in my methods, wished me good luck with my project and provided valuable suggestions.
Every morning at 8:30 a plenary session was held by a keynote speaker; the topics were all interesting. Afterwards I attended several sessions in meta’omics, marine microbiology, biogeochemical cycling and also in visualizing microbial activity. These were all topics I am very interested in and which are related to a certain degree to my work.
Beside the scientific program, Wednesday was free for the attendees to either explore the city on their own or to attend to a social program which were also offered by the conference. Another social program was the opportunity to attend the social gathering on Tuesday. We visited the zoo and met in the congress hall for dinner and a party. It was a good chance to meet different PhD students from other universities and talk about our PhD projects in a more private surrounding.
On Thursday evening the Tiedje award was given to Prof. Wagner from University of Vienna. He is an expert in nitrification and ammonia oxidizing organisms. He also visited my poster on Monday and so I got the chance to speak with him in person.
Overall it was a great experience for me and a good chance to present my results to a wide scientific audience and to meet international scientist in my research field of Microbial Ecology. Finally, I would like to thank GLOMAR for their financial support for this conference stay.
