After a very hectic travel experience, I arrived in Denver around 2pm Monday and headed straight to the convention center. After checking in, I met up with Owen to watch a session on the physics of end-stage cancer metabolism. When we left this talk, I said hi to Dr. Lehman and headed back to the hotel to check in.
I went to a lot of talks on Tuesday, but I think that the highlight of the day for me was the Speak for Science Workshop on science advocacy. I learned a lot about how the government interacts with and makes decisions affecting science and where in the process I can be the most effective as an advocate for science. I also looked through the Exhibit Hall for the first time and checked out the Grad Fair where I got a super cute spherical cow stress ball (and a ton of information on graduate programs, of course).
Wednesday was poster day! Maddy and I arrived at the convention center and set up our posters around 10am and prepared for our poster session at 12pm. I got the opportunity to tell a lot of people about my work in the beadpile lab and also spoke to some other undergrads about their research experiences.
Wednesday:
Later Wednesday, I attended my favorite talk of the entire conference, “Entangled-photon super-resolution microscopy and foundations,” presented by Lihong Wang (Caltech). The talk discussed the improvements to image resolution that can be made by using quantum imaging rather than classical. The images comparing resolution from quantum and classical imaging were like day and night. I was shocked at just how much detail in an image can be seen using entangled photons. Super cool!
I spent the morning at the conference on Thursday because I had to fly out that afternoon. I went to two sessions, one on the applications of quantum optics and another on memory in soft and living matter. Last, I visited Owen’s poster presentation for his summer work on rotational equilibrium in nanoscale particles when interacting with light.