My First Society for Freshwater Sciences

This is truly going to be the summer of conferences.  I just concluded my second conference and I feel like summer is only starting. Luckily this one was in Raleigh.  I attended some great sessions and got to meet people doing some really great research. This was my first “science- centric” conference.  It was a really great experience to see work from the perspective of biologists, ecologists and the like.   As I perused a silent book auction I was reminded, once again, how much I have to learn about the complex and beautiful science of water.

I gave two talks at SFS .  The talks were the shortest I’ve given.  We have 15 minutes (including questions).  The first was in a Constructed Wetland session wherein I discussed some of our ongoing research related to the photochemical degradation of contaminants of emerging concern. I really enjoyed this session.  It was moderated by my colleague Mike Burchell with the NC State Biological Engineering department.  Mike organized a great group of speakers with a really nice story arc.  Yes, that’s right – the session had a logical procession.  Each speakers topic seemed to feed into the next.   Very cool.  It was great to see what folks are working on.

The second session I was a part of was moderated by my colleagues Dan Obenour (NC State) and Nathan Hall (UNC).  Here I spoke about Alex’s ongoing research to develop a water column reactor to study the effects of mixing on phytoplankton community structure.   My talk was similar to what Alex gave in Sacramento @ the EWRI conference.  There were some great questions and continued discussion after the session ended.  A great job by Dan and Nate both as moderators and presenters in the session.  Dan presented an aggregation of our lake mixing work from our NSF RAPID and WRRI grants.  The results looked great up there.  Now to  finish up some manuscripts!

One of the other highlights was the poster session on Wednesday.  Jeremy and Yue presented their research.  It’s always great to see students explain their work to others.  They did a great job.  And, although I’m biased I think they had some of the best looking posters up there!