• Networking.  saw many people who have been very helpful and informative to me at the beginning of my professorial career, including Gina MacDonald, Sean Decatur, Matt Kubasik and Myriam Cotten.
• Collaboration. had a productive conversation with Sonia Longhi, who I will see again soon.
• Students.  was able to watch my excellent three seniors do a great job with their poster presentations.  They really made Haverford proud.
• Science.  Made myself quite a long list of ideas to tap in both teaching and research as things move forward; will do my best to fight through my long list of possibilities to explore within the next week.

Now on to the grades:

• The meeting content: A-.  A good and very well-attended year, with science to reflect the broad range of attendees.
• San Francisco: A.  What  a city!
• The food: A. and there is plenty that I missed; good thing I am going back in a month for the always-disastrous national ACS meeting!
• The site: D.  Moscone is unfortunately not a good fit for this conference.  The only redeeming parts are that there is plenty of food within walking distance and the hotels are close.
• The Society: B+.  The Society staff did a good job dealing with onsite issues as they popped up, but some of the crowding and other issues might have been avoided given better estimates of attendence.  Kudos to Ellen Weiss and Erica Retrosi, among others, for managing many of the public-face aspects of the meeting (including the bloggers).

Thanks for reading; we will be sending this blog to archive in a few days, so it will be available for posterity’s sake.  If this sort of activity resumes again (and I believe it will, sooner rather than later seeing as how I have two trips coming up in the next three weeks), check my webpage for new links.

After a great conference (see final analysis post, to come shortly), we enjoyed Wed. afternoon by having lunch at the Embarcardero and an afternoon walk in Golden Gate Park. We were ready to board our red-eye flight at 9:00pm and everyone boarded on time for the 10:00pm departure. Due to many passengers’ pushing up their flights to Philly and points east due to impending (at the time) bad weather, the terminal 1 bar at SFO was packed and the plane was very full of jolly (to say the least) passengers.
So we were loaded in, and then… about 60 minutes later, the captain announced a fueling problem. about 45 minutes after that, it was announced that they were having trouble making weight calculations for the airplane and promised we would get going in fine minutes. About 45 minutes after that (now after midnight), it was announced that the plane could not be balanced due to a cargo door being broken and we would switch to another plane, which only had 26 rows instead of 33 and thus passengers in rows 26-33 were SOL and abandoned to the oncoming storm and resulting schedule changes over the next few days.
Fortunately, we have dealt with USAir before, so this was not a surprise and I was able to smile through the entire ordeal (it also helped that we were in rowns 11 and 14 and thus I inadvertently scored an exit row on the new plane). We were regaled throughout this experience by a woman from Atlantic City who had patronized the bar and taken several Xanax (or something she was calling “Scooby Snacks”) before the flight.
So in the end, we arrived about 4 hours late, and luckily the storm in Philly was not as bad as had been predicted, which was a big surprise given our recent run of getting nailed by big snowfalls. We struggled back to campus, I dealt with some paperwork associated with a paper under review, and then decided I should stay up until dark to avoid jetlag. and then the kids had a snow day on Friday as well! My coherent state has just returned in the last few minutes, so I am now able to tell our tale and to look back on our conference experience.

Overall, I think we all had a great time at the meeting, despite being met with piles of homework upon our return. I learned a lot and got some really great ideas for the future direction of my project. It was great to see my family and visit home briefly, and as usual the San Francisco cuisine did not disappoint. Below are the remaining photos from the last few days of the trip.

Dinner with some fellow undergrads from JMU and Hamilton

The adult table

Group Photo!

The National Lecture

National Lecture

Out on the town with our amazing SF tour guide Santiago

Connor's Poster Presentation

Heather's Poster Presentation

The view of the city from the deYoung tower

• breakfast/lunch at ‘wichcraft: excellent sandwiches, one block from Moscone, quick cafe-style (and free wireless): 4.5/5

• Frjtz on Valencia for dinner: 7/5. Oh my lord. I knew this would be good but apparently I was not ready. The experience cannot be described: you have to have it yourself. (Hint: after all the beer, fries, etc. etc. order a dessert crepe with Oreo crumbs in the dough. just trust me here).

• Mijita (Mexican) at the Ferry building for lunch: great food, some outdoor seating, not incredibly expensive. 4.5/5. did pretty well for food while here!

Connor and Heather had good traffic at their posters this am, despite the gaping hole in the room left by the vendors in their stampede to get out of Dodge. Saw some interesting posters on amyloids and similar aggregates, membrane physics and chemistry, and more IDPs and protein dynamics issues.

There were more talks schedule for after the (moved-up) poster session, but you can stick a fork in me because I am done. I am currently sitting at Peet’s in the ferry building, enyoing the view and the much-improved weather. Will have dinner down south with my old friend from San Jose tonight before getting on a red-eye to go home.

I am pretty wiped out now, and I wasn’t the one up until 2am last night… this is what large meetings will do to you. Here is a quick executive summary of semi-scientific observations from the last couple of days.

Mon am: antimicrobial peptides. this is a moving field with lots of current interest that appears to depend mainly on leakage assays (to see whether the AMPs punch holes in membranes) and poorly interpreted far-UV CD data. Definitely still some room for creativity here, and plenty of room for both atomic-level experiments like solid-state NMR and MD simulations of varying stripes (although marrying MD simulations with experiments is going to be particularly hard in this case).

Tues am: amyloids, etc. Lots and lots of recent work in this field with lots of sketchy samples has led to very little actual structural insight into the toxic species in amyloid diseases. This meeting is remarkable for the kitchen sink of approaches being thrown at the problem in many systems with widely varying levels of success.

Tues pm: more posters! Lots of posters on protein dynamics, etc. and membranes and membrane-bound species, with the distinguishing characteristic again being the diversity of approaches taken. My head is now full… time for Frjtz!

1. The Blue Bottle Coffee Co. (5/5)

I went there twice at the Ferry Building – when I first arrived on Thursday and again on Saturday. Connor and Heather witnessed me wait in a really long line to get a cappuccino. Sooo worth it.

2. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (4.5/5)

I went to the one on Market St. near the Westfield. Their French Roast was really strong and smokey, which is how French Roast should be.

3. Starbucks at the BPS meeting (4/5)

Fortunately they’ve been serving Starbucks coffee during the coffee breaks at the meeting – and you really can’t go wrong with free Starbucks. Unfortunately the lines are really long and they tend to run out. If you want a cup without waiting too long you have to skip the last talk before the coffee break and lurk around the people setting up the coffee to ensure you’re first in line.

4. Hotel Metropolis free coffee (0/5)

I know why it was free – it tasted like dirty, hot water.

Heather and I also went to the new members welcome coffee (I think the chocolate cakes gets a 4.5/5), where we got to chat with a couple new members, as well as a BPS committee member. I went to the poster session after lunch and got to stop by a poster from the Feix group (“Biophysical studies of cecropin-mellitin antimicrobial peptides with improved selectivity”) to hear what they’ve been doing lately with CM15 (same peptide I work with). They’re doing some interesting work trying to modify CM15′s sequence to decrease its hemolytic activity while maintaining its antimicrobial activity. I also made a point to stop by a poster (“Creating steroidal ligand-receptor pairs for behavioral studies of androgen receptor”) from the  Fletterick group at UCSF. I interviewed with Robert Fletterick on Friday and he actually told me about the project that was presented in the poster session yesterday.

Connor, Sonia, and Casey

One thing I was immediately struck by at my first Biophysical Society meeting was the level of international participation.  I am not talking about foreign graduate students and postdocs, who are a huge population at many scientific meetings, but the actual number of people who travel from non-US locations to attend this meeting.  It means that when you talk to someone or meet someone new, he/she is often a world expert in their chosen subfield.

The meeting is a great incubator for international collaborations.  I heard Sonia Longhi from Marseilles, France give a great talk about pieces of the measles virus a few meetings ago, made contact, and my group began to work with our experimental methodology in the context of her proteins.  we had a chance earlier today to talk in some depth about the future of this work, prospects for publication, etc.  So for me, this year’s meeting was a wonderful realization of something that started at the same place several years ago.