By Amanda Holdman (M.S Student)
At the end of the week, the GEMM Lab will be pilling into our fuel efficient Subaru’s and start heading south to San Francisco! The 21st Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, hosted by the Society of Marine Mammalogy, kicks off this weekend and the GEMM Lab is all prepped and ready!
Workshops start on Saturday prior to the conference, and I will be attending the Harbor Porpoise Workshop, where I get to collaborate with several other researchers worldwide who study my favorite cryptic species. After morning introductions, we will have a series of talks, a lunch break, and then head to the Golden Gate Bridge to see the recently returned San Francisco harbor porpoise. Sounds fun right?!? But that’s just day one. A whole week of scientific fun is to be had! So let’s begin with Society’s mission:
‘To promote the global advancement of marine mammal science and contribute to its relevance and impact in education, conservation and management’
And the GEMM Lab is all set to do just that! The conference will bring together approximately 2200 top marine mammal scientists and managers to investigate the theme of Marine Mammal Conservation in a Changing World. All GEMM Lab members will be presenting at this year’s conference, accompanied by other researchers from the Marine Mammal Institute, to total 34 researchers representing Oregon State University!
Here is our Lab line-up:
Our leader, Leigh will be starting us off strong with a speed talk on Moving from documentation to protection of a blue whale foraging ground in an industrial area of New Zealand
Tuesday morning I will be presenting a poster on the Spatio-temporal patterns and ecological drivers of harbor porpoises off of the central Oregon coast
Solène follows directly after me on Tuesday to give an oral presentation on the Environmental correlates of nearshore habitat distribution by the critically endangered Maui dolphin.
Florence helps us reconvene Thursday morning with a poster presentation on her work, Assessment of vessel response to foraging gray whales along the Oregon coast to promote sustainable ecotourism.
And finally, Courtney, the most recent Master of Science, and the first graduate of the GEMM Lab will give an oral presentation to round us out on Citizen Science: Benefits and limitations for marine mammal research and education
However, while I am full of excitement and anticipation for the conference, I do regret to report that you will not be seeing a blog post from us next week. That’s because the GEMM Lab recently created a twitter feed and we will be “live tweeting” our conference experience with all of you! You can follow along the conference by searching #Marman15 and follow our Lab at @GemmLabOSU
Twitter is a great way to communicate our research, exchange ideas and network, and can be a great resource for scientific inspiration.
If you are new to twitter, like the GEMM Lab, or are considering pursuing graduate school, take some time to explore the scientific world of tweeting and following. I did and as it turns out there are tons of resources that are aimed for grad students to help other grad students.
For example:
Tweets by the thesis wisperer team (@thesiswisperer) offer advice and useful tips on writing and other grad related stuff. If you are having problems with statistics, there are lots of specialist groups such as R-package related hashtags like #rstats, or you could follow @Rbloggers and @statsforbios to name a few.
As always, thanks for following along, make sure to find us on twitter so you can follow along with the GEMM Labs scientific endeavors.
