This week, a few of the team and I have been enjoying the delights of Belfast at the International Society for Eye Research meeting. This biennial meeting brings together scientists and clinicians from around the world who work across all the specialities of ocular research. It is a really excellent meeting to showcase your work, make new connections, and learn about all the advances in different disciplines.
Meetings like this aren’t solely dominated by the big players in the field, there is a conscious effort to include junior researchers in the program and so John (2nd year PhD student) and Karen (just finished her PhD) were both selected to give oral presentations on their work into glaucoma (with Prof Colin “Pillowtree” Willoughby), while Lee also presented work relating to his recent paper on LaNts and laminins in the cornea as a poster during a really busy session. They all did really well and I had the standard proud dad moments watching the team coming of age and dealing with the questions from the leaders in their field with (outwardly) calm confidence.
Good times and we’ve come away with some new collaborators and ideas for experiments to take our research to the next level. A nice way to end the summer before teaching starts next week.
As an interesting aside, I discovered that Prof Pillowtree prefers for his team to sit in train formation during talks… apparently he thinks it keeps them on track (acording to Krn)!
LaNts and Laminins 
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