It has been quite the week in New Orleans at the 55th Annual SOT meeting. Prior to the actual start of the meeting, I volunteered to be a host mentor for the Committee for Diversity Initiatives (CDI) Sunday programming. However, prior to that programming, my senior student, Nancy Tran, and I attended the Pfizer breakfast to honor her award as a Pfizer undergraduate travel award winner.

After that breakfast, Nancy and I headed to the conference center where we sat in on lectures, participated in an interactive lecture, and interacted with undergraduates that hailed from all over the country. On Monday, the meeting began in earnest; SOT hosts quite a large meeting—this year it had 6,843 attendees! I was most interested in Nrf2 and ROS sessions (of which there were many!). Additionally, Nancy and I had fun wandering around the ToxExpo collecting pens and other giveaways. Monday night culminated in a great Woods Hole toxicology reunion, bringing together former and current members. In attendance were Wade Powell, Alicia Timme-Laragy, Matt Jenny, Akira Kubota, Josh Gray, Mark Hahn, John Stegeman, Jed Goldstone, my student Nancy Tran, and myself. We ate at K-Paul’s and enjoyed the food and company alike.

Fast forward to Wednesday; it was a big day for both Nancy and myself as we both gave presentations. Nancy presented her award-winning poster on her senior thesis topic focused on the role of Nrf1 paralogs in the response to phthalate exposure in zebrafish.

I presented in an educational platform session on my semester-long, inquiry-based, Ahr lab that I use in my upper-level molecular course at Bates. On Wednesday night I was lucky enough to have dinner with a former graduate school friend, John House, and his wife at Antoine’s. Leaving at 5:45 the next morning, I flew back to Portland for my next and very different meeting: Benthic Ecology.