Day 1 of Keystone
(Welcome to Steamboat Springs! This is the view from the 8th floor of the resort where we are quaintly nestled)
Today was our first official day at Keystone! We began the day with a light breakfast and coffee at 7:15 am (for the non-morning folk like myself, the time difference and coffee truly made this bearable). From 8:00 – 11:15 we were bombarded with information about developmental hematopoiesis, touching upon differences between primitive and definitive hematopoiesis as well as picking up a bit of biochemistry and crystallography to highlight structure/function relationships in transcription factors (I feel forever indebted to professor Owen for her wonderful lectures on biochemistry as they were the only reason I could keep up during that talk!). Afterwards we had a quick lab meeting (with pizza!) before returning to the second round of talks focusing on stem cell self-renewal. Although I felt my brain had reached full capacity b 11:15, somehow, someway I was able to make it through a second round of non-stop science! The talks ended with a wonderful keynote address by George Q. Daley, speaking on the simultaneous awe inspiring progress and frustrations of HSC production from pluripotent stem cells. After a light dinner and discussion about some of the talks, our lab headed to the poster presentations where Trevor Barlowe (’13), Sophie Eiger (’14), and Ruben Land (’12) presented some of the most recent and interesting Punterson research! Although I was meandering through the poster session myself, I did see quite the crowds around their poster and I am sure that they gave wonderful presentations to all.
(RL, TB, SE from left to right standing in front of their poster)
Tomorrow we are scheduled for more talks in the morning, but have a free afternoon, which I am sure will be spent dashing down the ski slopes.
Until tomorrow,
Ashley