Cohort 5 trip to the MRS Spring Meeting in San Franscico

Easter saw Cohort 5 finally undertake the long anticipated trip to San Francisco where we attended our first ever conference, the MRS Spring Meeting.

After our arrival on Saturday we were ready to explore San Francisco on bikes the following day. Our 8+ hour trip took us around most of San Francisco, with highlights including cycling across the Golden Gate bridge and relaxing at the beach or in Golden Gate park. The conference itself began on Monday and lasted through to Friday. Though the enormous size of it and wealth of topics to choose from was overwhelming initially we all ended up finding interesting talks to go to on all the days. The caricaturist and free ice cream at the Exhibition are definitely worth a mention as well.

On Thursday we visited the Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that gave us an insight into their approach to science research, which is very collaboration focused. After a tour through their labs, where we saw modern microscopes and clean rooms, we explored the Berkeley campus before heading back to San Francisco. This day out was definitely one of the best experiences of the trip and showed us what life after our PhD could be like.

We returned back home to the UK happy and exhausted after a week of interesting science and tasty American food, grateful to have had such a unique experience with the entire cohort.