One Year In

 

It's an adjustment, starting grad school. Even if you've already done research work, becoming a teaching assistant, taking on more responsibility in the lab or even lecturing to a class can be daunting! But fear not - these are challenges that all academics have overcome in their careers and so will you. This week, MSc student Isabelle Marincic reflects on her first year experience.

by Isabelle Marincic

It’s official! I am one year into my masters, yet I am feeling dumber than ever before. Well, not really, but being in a constant state of learning makes me feel like I never actually know anything for certain. After a slight crash-out with my supervisor (shout out John), I am finally starting to feel like I belong, and that maybe I can actually get through this degree. I want to dedicate this blog post to things I’ve learned, skills I’ve gained, and things I am still working on. (This blog post topic was inspired by Grace’s wonderful enrichment exercise at the last group meeting.)

What have I learned (seriously!)

Throughout a masters, learning comes in many forms. This can be academic or personal, in that while I have definitely gained scientific knowledge I have also gained knowledge about how I am able to effectively conduct research. A hard lesson learned was how self-regulated a masters degree really is, and as it turns out, I needed to come to terms with the fact that I am really bad at self-motivation sometimes. Most days my schedule is completely up to me, which sounds ideal in theory but in practice allows for the perpetuation of bad habits, such as doom-scrolling on reels. This combined with the crushing weight of impostor syndrome leads to quite the unproductive day. I quickly realized that I needed to change my mindset, mostly regarding my impostor syndrome. For a while doing research felt like; “Why even bother if I know some other masters student out there is way smarter than me?” I bother because I love research, I love what I am researching, and this is the place I know I want to be. On top of my difficulty in an academic setting, the negative self-talk was seeping into other areas of my life, into things I also simply love doing. So, while having learned a lot about remote sensing techniques and methane measurements on Mars, one of the most important learning experiences was learning how to speak nicer to myself. Self-motivation can be really difficult - and it is currently a work in progress - but it is most definitely progressing in the right direction. Thankfully, I work with an amazing group of people who always offer the best and most comforting advice :) 

Have I even gained any skills?

You bet I have. Again, skills can be separated into academic and personal. The academic skills I have gained are small but mighty. For instance, I can read better now. And by this I mean I can better approach a research paper rather than having absolutely no clue where to start. A good place to start is the abstract, though. Then I like to read headings and assess the flow of the paper. Sometimes I accidentally end up just reading the entire paper depending on how cool the research is, but this is often a waste of time </3 

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to give a lecture on Martian methane (see image above)! I was really excited to work on my public speaking skills as this skill is crucial when attending conferences and presenting your research. I also hope to continue down the academic track to obtain a professorship (in a thousand years) so giving a lecture fit right in with that goal.  

Finally with regards to a personal skill that I’ve gained, I realized that in order to complete work I HAVE to allot hours in my day to specific tasks. Otherwise, I will literally not complete anything. Perhaps I acquired this skill a little late in the game but better late than never!

Some more room to grow

There will always be room for a person to grow, which is what makes life so fulfilling. Although, it can be hard to admit you need to grow, hence my crash out. I was in denial for a couple of months about the severity of my issues, resulting in such a build up of feelings that they all came out in a teary mess. So, moving forward, I plan on maintaining a positive internal dialogue, and to simply keep trying new things despite not feeling 10000% confident. This holds true for my academic endeavours, like writing my first paper, or my athletic endeavours, because my climbing gym is sandbagged and I keep falling off the wall. But like most things in life worth doing, you have to suck before you can get better!

 

Talking to Mars

This week, PhD student Diana Hayes takes a look at how we communicate with spacecraft dispersed throughout the solar system. Given the number of assets at Mars, the situation on the red planet is particularly complex and therefore particularly interesting. Like any infrastructure, maintenance is critical to enabling future science if we expect to continue to count on the capable systems we have in place today.

by Diana Hayes

Here on Earth, we’ve built a sophisticated global telecommunications network that allows us to talk to people on the other side of the planet nearly instantaneously with very little difficulty, whether that be through the internet, texts, phone calls, or video chats. It’s easy to take this interconnectivity for granted. For example, if I have data that I want to share with a collaborator in Europe, can upload it to a Microsoft server from my computer, send them a OneDrive link, and they can download it to their computer; unless something goes wrong somewhere along the way, there’s very little thought from either of us about the intricate complexities of the systems that make this possible.

But what if your collaborator is on another planet?

This is a question that every interplanetary mission needs to answer. For many missions, the answer is simple: the Deep Space Network (DSN). The DSN consists of 14 radio telescopes spread across three sites in Spain (Madrid), the United States (Goldstone), and Australia (Canberra). This spacing ensures that at least one telescope has a direct line-of-sight to every location in the Solar System further than about 30,000 kilometres from Earth. The data rates seem laughable compared to what we can achieve on the ground, as they’re limited both by the size and power of the DSN telescopes and the antennas that can be put on a spacecraft, as well as the distance between Earth and a given spacecraft. For example, as I write this, one of the DSN telescopes is talking to Juno (orbiting Jupiter) at 50 kilobits per second, while another is talking to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at 550 kilobits per second. For comparison, the wireless internet connection here at York typically averages around 100 megabits per second.

A screenshot of NASA’s DSN Now page, highlighting a communications session between one of the deep space antennas in Canberra and the Mars Odyssey orbiter.

For orbiters and flyby missions, the DSN is good enough. You can put a reasonably large, powerful antenna on your spacecraft and talk directly to Earth with minimal difficulty. For landed missions, the situation is more complex. When landing on another planet, minimizing the weight and size of your spacecraft is essential, so you can’t really just use a big antenna unless you’re willing to sacrifice science instruments for it. The solution we’ve come up with is relay communications. Rather than talking directly to Earth, a rover or lander first transmits its data to a spacecraft in orbit, which then uses its more powerful antenna to transmit that data to Earth. Because the lander-orbiter distance is much smaller than the lander-Earth distance, you can get away with much smaller antennas on the lander. 

Over time, this strategy has led to the development of the Mars Relay Network (MRN), which consists of a number of Mars orbiters that rovers and landers on the surface can use to talk to Earth. At the moment, there are four orbiters in the MRN: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), Mars Odyssey, and Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN). Relay communications is not the primary mission of any of these orbiters, but they all were specifically outfitted with the instruments needed to serve as part of the MRN.

There is one obvious limitation to using this method to communicate with our landers and rovers on Mars: data can only be transmitted when an orbiter is above the horizon. During rover planning, this means that we need to keep track of when orbiters are available to receive data, and to prioritize which data we want to receive first since we can’t always downlink all of the data on the rover during a single comms pass. Fortunately, because we understand the movements and capabilities of our orbiters pretty well, this is really only a minor problem. 

Top: The elevation of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as seen from Curiosity during the first week of 2025. Most of the time, the orbiter is below the horizon, passing over Gale about twice a day. Bottom: A close-up of the highest-elevation pass of MRO on January 4, 2025, highlighting how the orbiter is only above the horizon  for a very short period of time, about 15 minutes, which limits the amount of data that can be transmitted.

Less avoidable is the motion of the planets themselves. Every few years, Earth and Mars pass on opposite sides of the Sun, an event we call “solar conjunction.” When this happens, interference from the Sun can cause data corruption in the signals sent through the MRN. Corrupted data received from Mars isn’t the end of the world, since the data aren’t deleted from the rovers’ computers until they are verified to have been received intact on Earth, so any missing data can just be re-transmitted. Of more concern is data transmitted to Mars, which usually consists of rover commands. We really don’t want to send corrupted commands to our rovers, so during conjunction, we stand down from operations until the apparent angular separation between the planets is large enough for data to be transmitted reliably.

The apparent angle between Mars and the Sun, as viewed from Earth between the start of 2023 and the end of 2026. About once every two years, this angle is so small that the Sun blocks data transmission between the two planets, a period known as “solar conjunction.”

The MRN has become a critical piece of infrastructure in the exploration of Mars, but it’s facing an imminent crisis: it’s aging. Odyssey, the oldest part of the MRN, was launched in 2001, while the newest (TGO) was launched in 2016. The fragility of this age was highlighted in December of last year when the DSN lost contact with MAVEN. Although recovery efforts are ongoing, NASA has admitted that it’s unlikely that communication with MAVEN will be re-established. MAVEN had the highest data transmission capabilities of any of the four orbiters, so its likely loss leaves a gaping hole in the MRN. The other orbiters can at least partially fill that hole, but it’s obvious that something needs to be done before we lose another orbiter. Some proposals have been made, such as the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO), which was cancelled in 2005 before being revived in NASA’s 2025 budget. Dedicated telecom orbiters are much less sexy (scientifically speaking) than science orbiters, which makes justifying their cost to national legislatures much more difficult, despite their importance. 

By the way, this isn’t limited to just Mars. For example, the Huygens probe, which landed on Saturn’s largest moon Titan in 2005, relayed its data through the Cassini spacecraft. Notably, Dragonfly, NASA’s upcoming rotorcraft mission to Titan, will not be using a data relay, instead opting for direct-to-Earth communication. To make this possible with any kind of appreciable data volume while not using the much larger antennas found on spacecraft like Juno, Cassini, and Voyager, Dragonfly will be taking advantage of the large amount of energy provided by its nuclear power system (similar to the one used by Curiosity and Perseverance), which will allow it to transmit much stronger signals with a much smaller antenna.

If you’re curious about what the DSN and MRN are up to right now, check out NASA’s DSN Now (https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html) and MRN (https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/mrn/) websites. 

DPS/EPSC 2025: Izzy’s First Masters Conference

 

One of the best parts about being an advisor is that you get to see growth in your trainees. Not only is is satisfying to see those students succeed, but you are also reminded of the early times in your own career. There is no more reliable occasion for such moments than a masters student's first conference. This week is Izzy's turn to talk about this evergreen topic on our blog!
(Above: Izzy at the Airport. Image credit: Izzy's father)

By Isabelle Marincic

From the title, you probably have been able to deduce the topic of today’s blog post. What you may not have guessed is that I am going to recount to you in chronological order the events of my first conference during my masters degree!

Step one was getting to the airport (YYZ, Rush). My father graciously drove me to the airport for my 4:30 pm flight on September 5th, 2025. Pictured above is my father embarrassingly sending me off while he waited outside of security. Naturally, I was about 2.5 hours early for my flight. 

 

Feeling under-packed and tired, I bought a delicious panini to tie myself over until they fed me dinner on the plane (yum!). I think I slept most of the flight to the layover location: Frankfurt. Upon arriving at the Frankfurt airport, I took the world's longest bus ride to the other side of this ginormous airport hoping I would magically arrive at my terminal. Which I did! Long story short, I accidentally gave the German government my fingerprint, and waited in a very long line for security. One final flight later, I arrived in Helsinki, Finland. Very excited to take European public transportation, I trained to the city center, and meandered my way to my hotel on foot. First impressions of Finland: grey.

 

Fast forward to Sunday, September 7th after Milena and Abby arrive. We took this day to peruse areas near our hotel before the conference began the following day. Abby and I guided a ship to shore, and got some steps in. 

 

 

 

With this being my first conference attended during my masters, I was extremely excited to learn about tons of new science, to meet other scientists interested in the same things as I, and to present the work I had completed so far since arriving at York. There was an immense amount of information being relayed throughout the conference, it was so much all at once that I had trouble remembering most of it. This was a lesson for me to take notes at the next conference I attend. But, the programme included talks on terrestrial planets, outer planet systems, small bodies (comets, asteroids, etc), exoplanets, origins of planetary systems and astrobiology, and outreach, diversity, and amateur astronomy. The talks I primarily attended were those in my general field of astrobiology, along with talks given by members of my lab.  

 

 

 

One of the highlights of the conference with regards to my professional development was the poster I presented during the Exoplanet and Astrobiology poster session. Tragically, I only attracted a single visitor to my poster. While it was slightly awkward to stand by my poster for about an hour without being able to talk about my research, I still firmly believe in the writing and presenting of poster presentations. It is a necessary segue into academic writing, which is a very difficult skill to master. I have yet to do so. So, writing short abstracts that explain your work to a relatively broad audience is good practice for advancing your academic writing skills in the long run, especially for undergraduate students.

 

 

 

Overall there were two lessons learned during this conference: (1) take notes, and (2) talk to more people! I was insanely nervous as this was my first time interacting with a large group of intelligent people, so it was quite intimidating. I know Abby and Elisa have no problem with this part of the job, so maybe I should ask for some tips. I personally enjoy collaborating and sharing ideas with people in my field, as I believe this helps improve my science by hashing things out-loud. Now that I am a whopping 4 more months into my degree, I think I will have more ideas to share during AbSciCon 2026 :)
 

Lastly, below are some images of Helsinki during the touristy part of the conference trip! Helsinki was a 

very inviting and pleasant city, especially with the availability of public transit which the North American mind could not comprehend.

 

  

  

Cleaning up the lab… finally!

 

 Whenever you are doing research, it's important to control the chaos. That could be keeping notes and reference papers organized, keeping track of simulations and parameters or the physical items that accumulate in any lab. This week, Kevin describes a major cleanup in our lab to keep entropy at bay for a little while longer.

by Kevin Axelrod

December 20, 2025 was finally the day. 

I have been at the PVL for over 2 years now, and while projects and some people have come and gone, one thing has always remained constant: our PVL lab room has looked like my bedroom when I was 7. Because we work in planetary sciences, we have a wide variety of equipment – from optical equipment to vacuum chamber components to flow tubing to spectrometers to regolith simulant to various chemicals. And that is before we get to all the non-science items in the lab, like books and files, as well as that big Venus globe! 

Keeping all these things organized is difficult, with so many different projects in and out of the lab. And at times, motivation to clean can ebb and flow, both for me and a lot of other people. But, on the week of December 15, just one week before I planned to leave town for the winter holiday, I decided that it was finally time to get down on it. 

It started when we needed to pack up our Martian Atmospheric Gas Evolution (MAGE) experimental breadboard spectrometer and send it back to our industrial partner, ABB. Abby and I had collected a pallet and ordered some bubble wrap and shrink film a few weeks prior, and on December 16 we put those materials to use (below). Shipping it out via LTL freight, which happened on December 19, only 2 days before I left for the holiday, was a significant step towards making the lab genuinely clean. This was not just because it had been sitting in there for a few weeks and was crowding our lab, but also in the process of shipping it out, we cleaned the lab upstairs (which belonged to a different group and was where we conducted most of our experimentation with this spectrometer).

Sending it out freed up a little bit of space on our optical table. Nonetheless, there was still a significant amount of optical equipment and other things lying out - tools strewn everywhere, old boxes/cardboard, tubing pieces from the spectrometer setup, etc. Even our chiller still contained ethylene glycol-based antifreeze from a project that occurred several months ago.  

It seemed like such a massive task that maybe we were beginning to accept the constant state of clutter. However, in many cases, constant clutter in a laboratory is a safety hazard, because it impedes the ability to conduct experiments in an organized fashion, and introduces issues like tripping and spilling hazards. So, on December 20, with my flight out of Toronto less than 24 hours away, I drank a cup of coffee, put in my earbuds, and somehow just got into the zone. I went through the lab putting away tools, taking apart optical equipment, wiping down counters, and throwing away scraps. I officially started a “Sharps” disposal box for our lab (we were starting to use glass pipettes on a regular basis) and also started and labeled waste disposal containers for the ethylene glycol. I also started a “Misc/I don’t know” box. This box is for all the things that are probably optical components, but I am not completely certain of exactly what they are or how they are used in optical setups. “Misc” is a Swiss-army knife of a lousy excuse for a box label, isn’t it? 

The lab is far from perfect so far. We still have 2 desks in the back of the room that are filled with miscellaneous computer equipment, the corner next to the door is overflowing with old poster tubes, and the floor could use a sweeping. But, when cleaning a lab, just like in conducting scientific experiments, progress is always incremental. I forgot to take a “Before” picture, but the “After” picture is at the top of this post. It will keep getting better, too.

Two final thoughts:

1. For what feels like the millionth time, our lab’s tape measure has gone missing. It might be time for another trip to our local hardware store.
2. During this day, I listened to a lot of what I would call “indie EDM” and a lot of the songs made me think of outer space.  We need to start making a PVL playlist/mixtape.

[Insert Title Here]

Writing is a key part of being a researcher of any kind. It's not enough to do the work, take the data or make the discovery. It's not science until it is shared. This week, Alex reflects on their writing journey.

By Alex Innanen

I like to think of myself as a pretty good writer. Very young me harboured the wish to be a famous novelist when I grew up, and I probably still have old notebooks hidden somewhere in my parents’ house full of stories and attempted novels. There’s a lot about writing I like. I like putting words together in interesting and clever ways (I am a big fan of puns), I like figuring out how best to say something, and I really like the rules of language which feel a bit like a puzzle. In first year engineering we had a Technical Writing for Engineers course that many of my classmates groaned about but for me I was thrilled to have a whole class full of grammar quizzes. 

Moderate bragging aside, there’s one thing I struggle with time and again when I’m writing and that is choosing a title. Several of the posts I’ve written for this very blog have been sent to John with something like ‘I can’t think of a good title, HELP!’ at the top. I also write blog posts about once a month for the Curiosity Rover’s mission updates page, and there’s many a time I’ll have the whole post written, sitting in my inbox ready to be sent for approval and struggling to think of a title. 

It's not just blog titles either – short stories, journal articles, even my dissertation. And all these different kinds of writing need different sorts of titles! But this post is not just for me to complain about how hard titles are though. Having toiled in the title mines for as long as I have, I’ve developed some tricks and observations about choosing a good title. 

The job of your title is to give your audience somewhat of an idea of what they’re getting into, or at least to interest them enough that they might want to read what you’ve written. For something like a blog post, I try to keep it relatively short and clear. The title of this post, for instance, pokes fun at not being able to come up with a title while also giving an idea of what the post may be about. When I’m writing mission updates for Curiosity I tend to go one of two ways: some wordplay or reference to a well known phrase (for example, “New Year, New Clouds”), or succinctly describing something important from the plan (like “On Top of the Ridge” – three guesses where we were). 

Writing a title for a paper is a bit different. You can assume that whoever is reading your title has a bit more familiarity with the subject so you can be a bit more specific. Sometimes this leads to marathon-length titles. The title of my first research note, for example, “Minimum Mars Climate Sounder Retrieval Altitudes Reveal Cloud Altitudes at Aphelion and Stranded High-altitude Dust Following the MY34 Global Dust Storm on Mars” is twenty three entire words. This may seem a bit excessive, but you cannot deny that it tells you exactly what’s in the note. We’re also big fans of the humble colon in academia. My master’s thesis was titled “Aphelion Cloud Formation and Swiss Cheese Sublimation: Martian Atmospheric Water Vapour Processes”. The first bit of the title tells you the two subjects of my thesis, the second part ties them together. Sometimes, Journals will have guidelines for paper titles. Acta Astronautica, for example, has a 15 word limit. My research note above wouldn’t fly, and in fact the title I proposed for the paper I submitted there (which I posted about here) was too long and I had to figure out how to fit what I wanted to say in their word limit (I think I changed ‘Canadian Arctic’ to ‘Arctic’). 

So maybe I actually do know a bit more about this title thing than I thought when I started writing this blog post. In fact, I feel confident enough to offer some things to think about when you’re coming up with a title: 

1. Consider your audience. Will they recognise what Aphelion means? Will they enjoy a good pop culture reference? 
2. What is/are the main takeaway(s) of your piece? Are there different subjects you need to link?
3. Is there a word limit? Should there be a word limit? How can you be more concise?
4. How are you going to get people excited to read what you’ve written? 

As with most things, though, practice helps. The more I write, the more titles I need to think of and the less daunting it gets each time.  

Baby’s First Conference Talk

Public speaking: it's a critical part of communicating your science. But, apocryphally, most people would rather do almost anything else, even something unpleasant. I can tell you that even for me, the anxiety is real. It's there, any time I'm giving a talk or delivering a lecture. That can be a good thing, pushing you to refine your technique and your content. Some can even harness the nervous energy in their delivery! Fortunately, I've found most audiences to be understanding - our colleagues remember feeling that way too. Below, MSc student Abby discusses her first experience delivering a scientific presentation at a conference.

by Abigail Newton

To be perfectly clear before we begin: I am not a public speaker. I don’t consider myself to be good at presentations, I certainly haven’t had much practice with large crowds, and my brain stops working the moment I open my mouth. For all these reasons, I signed up for a 12-minute oral presentation at the International Meeting for Planetary Missions 6 (IPM) conference. The moment I saw the email pop-up in my inbox indicating that I received a presentation slot, I regretted all my previous decisions. But it was too late – I had no choice but to get prepared. Though I couldn’t have expected it, this presentation ended up being one of the best decisions I could have made.

The topic of my presentation was a cloud sensor, designed to turn on a camera when it detects Martian clouds are overhead. However, mere weeks before the conference, my sensor prototype was still unfinished, and I had another presentation at a different conference a month after IPM. It was a busy summer to say the least. Gathering my results just 5 days before my presentation – at a time when wildfire smoke concentrations were at the highest level they would be all summer – I found that my sensor could separate smoke from clouds. This was an unexpected, but welcome discovery. IPM itself is unique in that it’s attended by primarily engineers and was completely instrument-focused – completely up my alley.

Once I had gathered my results and wrapped my mind around the implications for my instrument concept, I decided to tackle the presentation itself. I practiced – wrote and rewrote, stumbled through a rocky presentation within the department, redid the presentation, got a class-A lecture from my airplane seat-mate on how I should “just relax”, practiced some more, anxiously sat through presentation after presentation on instruments with MILLIONS of dollars in funding, all before it was finally my turn. I wanted to vomit.

After 12 minutes of complete blackout, I found myself back in my seat. I came to and realized: it went well! I got a laugh out of the audience at the very beginning that allowed me to loosen up and relax through the rest of it. Did I make some small mistakes while speaking? Yes. Was I perfectly engaging every corner of the room? No.

Unfortunately, my worst fear came true.  I got stumped by a question that was perhaps less than relevant to my presentation in front of a room full of world-class scientists I was desperate to impress. I did not give an answer that could in any way be described as coherent, but the moderator stepped in and shut it down. 

Seasoned scientists and engineers continued to ask interesting questions about my presentation for the rest of the conference – the kindest people, treating me as a peer. My results showing the detection of amounts of wildfire smoke significant enough to override the thick cloud cover above caught attention and brought questions about making a similar version of the sensor for dust – something I had already been considering. Even better, my presentation was on the first day, so I was able to take a deep breath and enjoy the rest of the conference stress-free. 

Lots of hiking and learning was done in beautiful Boulder over the rest of the week. I was inspired by both presentations on the future of instrumentation and the gorgeous landscape. I would massively recommend giving conference presentations to any grad student terrified of public speaking – exposure therapy is the way to go.   

Say Yes to the Lab Group

It's an interesting exercise to look back from time to time. Can you make out the pathway that brought you to where you are today? No matter whether the decision at any particular juncture was good or ill in retrospect, as the song (and Mary Schmich column) goes: "your choices are half chance." But why not improve those odds? Today, MSc student Milena Markovich offers some advice for those thinking about returning to university for graduate school.

By Milena Markovich 

In December of 2023 I found myself with that annoying, undeniable and incurable itch. The itch to go back to school. Only six months after graduating from five arduous years of an engineering undergraduate program, complete with all-nighters, co-op terms and oceans of coffee, I had vowed that industry was the place for me. I wanted a break – a simple 9-to-5, no working on weekends (most weeks at least), no worrying about assignments or exams.  However, after only a couple months as a full-time engineer, I knew that this was not what I wanted my future career to look like. I had always paved my path through engineering with the goal of one day working in the space industry – and, after all, what was I waiting for? I decided “one day” had to become “today”. Now that I had made up my mind to pursue graduate school, I began the hunt every little scientist dreams of – the hunt for the perfect lab group.
 

Here we get to the crux of this blog post: an easy (in theory) how-to guide for finding the perfect grad school program for you. Step number one: “thank you, next” – meaning, establish your dealbreakers. For myself, the past 5 years of my life had been spent laboring over an engineering degree, and I was hesitant to throw that all away. I wanted my MSc program to be a low-stakes introduction to the world of research. From this principal objective, I could establish two requirements. First, the program or research must have some relation to engineering, whether it be with engineering courses or instrument-based research. Second, I needed to graduate from this program debt-free, such that I could later choose whether to remain in academia or return to industry, without the pressure of financial stressors. This led me to limit my search to graduate programs within Canada, both for the proximity to friends and family and to avoid hefty international tuition fees.

Step number two: “so tell me what you want, what you really, really want” – or, set your core values. Seriously answer the dreaded question from every behavioural interview: “where do you see yourself five years from now?”. No one stays in grad school forever (at least I hope not), and as such you need to tailor your graduate program to the career you want. No doubt priorities shift, interests evolve, and you can finish grad school with an entirely different goal. But based on your aspirations right now, you can start your hunt for a supervisor. For myself, I knew I wanted to retain the engineering mindset I had built from my undergraduate program. I also knew I valued the novel approach of my program – integrated engineering at UBC, which allowed me to learn multiple disciplines of engineering, informing a systems-based approach. These values were what initially made Dr. Moores’ career, and the Planetary Volatiles Laboratory, stand out to me. Having completed an undergraduate degree in engineering science at U of T, John has built his career bridging engineering and science interests in space exploration missions.

Step number three: “you’ve gotta have faith”. When it comes to grad school applications, a myriad of factors play into a supervisor’s ability to accept you as a student. When I first reached out to John, I initially received the dreaded “sorry, no vacancy”. However, as I continued connecting with various supervisors across Canada, a couple months later I opened my inbox to find a follow-up response. As luck would have it, a spot had opened up and I was able to meet with John to talk about potential thesis projects.

Step number four: “how deep is your love?” – I fear I must age myself and establish that this refers to the Bee Gees song, not Calvin Harris. Of equal importance as a supervisor or program, is your thesis project – namely, how much you can commit to this project. This is what will “take over” your life for the next, at minimum, two years. As such, you want to make sure that this project aligns with your goals beyond grad school. Imagine yourself sitting in an interview, discussing your work over the past couple years. Will this project help you impress your dream company and land the dream job? Will it help you take steps towards the path you want in academia? Is the project feasible to tackle with your skill set? Does it help you build a new skill set which you need to be a competitive candidate? When I first spoke to John, we discussed a modelling-based project which had me very hesitant to join the lab. I was steadfast in finding a project that would suit my engineering skills and which I could use to market myself to future employers in industry. Once again, in another blind stroke of luck, only a couple weeks after re-connecting with John he attended a conference which kickstarted renewed interest in a Lyman-alpha camera he has been working on for lunar ice prospecting from within permanently shadowed regions. Instrument-based? Check. Relevant to space industry interests? Also check. With this project aligning better with my goals, I was nearly sold on the Planetary Volatiles Lab.

Step number five: “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations”. If you are like me and have relocated for grad school, this step is likely of equal importance to everything else. Living in a new city, trying to make new friends while overwhelmed with the workload of research, taking courses and teaching assistantships can feel impossible. You want to establish what the lab culture is before you make this big jump. Ensure that the lab aligns with your personal expectations outside of research – a social, welcoming and warm atmosphere can help ease the transition to a new city. John happily connected me with Alex and Grace, both of whom helped confirm my decision for me. As numerous blog posts have detailed before, our lab makes time for social activities throughout the year and during conferences, facilitating a friendly environment. Establishing a support system within the lab has been the biggest factor in my success in moving to Toronto and starting graduate school. Research can be difficult in its own right, choosing a lab where you never feel alone helps to brighten both the tough times and the celebrations.

“Goodbye, everybody, I've got to go” – and that’s all folks. Following your own values, goals and passions will result in a foolproof strategy for picking the right lab group. These decisions are not one-size fits all, and at the end of the day only you can make this decision. So, think about these steps, write some pro’s-and-con’s lists and take the leap into the wacky world of graduate school. Whether this guide leads you to us at the Planetary Volatiles Lab or elsewhere, I wish you luck in your new adventure. 

Another Summer at PVL!

 Ahh, summertime! You'd be surprised by the number of people who think us academics just get four months of vacation. Instead, it's the busiest time of the year as we turn to focus almost exclusively on our research. But for those early career academics just stepping into research, it can be a formative experience. It's not just the work, but also the environment, the people and the excitement of having your own project in the midst of a talented and supportive group. I still remember my summer undergraduate research from back in the day. In this week's post, Ella shares her experience during her second summer with us. (Image Above: Kate, Brock and Ella canoeing at Sunnyside, the smallest ice-cream sizes at Kawartha, and the pizza party!)

 By Ella Ordinaria 

Hello PVL Blog! It’s me, Ella, the PVL undergrad! I wrote my first blog last summer, and here I am again – full circle!

This summer, I once again received the NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award, which allowed me to work in the lab full-time. My work focused on revising the Cruise Phase Microbial Survival (CPMS) model that Moores and Schuerger developed in 2020. The original CPMS model calculated the bioburden reduction on the Europa Clipper (EC) spacecraft under a direct and Venus-Earth-Earth Gravity Assist (VEEGA) trajectory. However, when EC launched in October of last year, it followed a Mars-Earth Gravity Assist (MEGA) trajectory instead. So, we revised the CPMS model to reflect the MEGA trajectory.

I started working on this project in early 2025, but things didn’t really pick up until summer. After all the modeling work, our goal was to produce a 2,500-word research note – which brought me my greatest challenge: writing. I was overwhelmed by the messy notes I’d written throughout the year, and the constant revisions made the words jumble together. As many of you know, scientific writing often feels like a never-ending cycle of writing, erasing, and rewriting.

Ultimately, we published the paper in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society (RNAAS). Seeing the work out there was so rewarding! I’m very grateful for the opportunity to write a first-author paper and for Dr. John Moores’s trust in entrusting this project to me. This would also not be possible without Dr. Moores, Dr. Schuerger, and PhD student Grace Bischoff, the co-authors of the paper. Their support and revisions have helped me grow immensely as a writer. I’m honored to receive guidance from the people I look up to! I also presented this work at the Lassonde Undergraduate Research Conference and did an interview on the AAS YouTube channel with Frank Timmins, the AAS Journals Deputy Editor-in-Chief. 

With the CPMS work crossed off my list, I spent the rest of the summer working on the Orbiting Sample (OS) container project. As with the CPMS model, we’re interested in bioburden reductions on the OS container, one of the key components of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. Since the MSR mission is one of the most ambitious planetary missions ever developed, the concept of “breaking the chain” of contact between Mars and Earth is a critical component. Coming from a biochemistry background, my main challenge on this project was the math and physics required to modify the original model to incorporate the energy balance during the cooling and heating phases of the OS container. I’m currently in the writing phase of this project which is a part of the process I do enjoy, though it’s also something I’d love to get better at. That said, most of my work at PVL has centered on modeling bioburden reductions on spacecraft, which happens to be one of my favorite concepts in astrobiology. Planetary protection excites me because it is an important consideration for forward and backward contamination, protecting Earth from foreign materials while ensuring the integrity of space exploration.

Work aside, this has probably been the most dynamic and eventful four months at PVL! With new students joining the lab, this summer was packed with fun socials and plenty of laughs. Some of our activities included rock climbing at Basecamp, trekking downtown to tackle the humongous ice cream portions at Kawartha Dairy, the annual summer pizza party, grabbing an iced matcha latte with Kate every morning (which we called the DOTD – drink of the day) and my personal favorite, the ultimate undergraduate adventure: canoeing at Sunnyside Beach. 

John and I at the Lassonde Summer Undergraduate Research Conference! 

Although summer has come to an end, thankfully my time at PVL has not. I’ll be taking the fall and winter semesters off for an internship, but I’ll still be involved with PVL to continue the OS project. Once a PVLer, always a PVLer!

Athletics + Academics = A Balanced Life

A challenge for many of us who do science professionally is knowing when to take a break. The engrossing feeling of diving into an all consuming problem can make it hard to remember to come up for air. But scientists are human beings too and we need other interests, connection and to take care of our physical bodies as much as anyone else. This week, our newest lab member Isabelle Marincic writes about how she strives to achieve that balance in her research career.

by Isabelle Marincic

Hello Lab Blog! My name is Izzy, and I’ve just joined the PVL as an MSc student in May 2025. I am so excited to be a part of this amazing group of scientists. I technically began working for Professor Moores in January as an RA, so I have been with the group for around 6 months. Within these first few months, I’ve begun working on projects related mainly to astrobiology (my favourite subject), including biological methane production on Mars and the feasibility of bacteria inhabiting Martian penitentes. I have also begun TA’ing which has been a new and exciting experience that I honestly have really enjoyed. On top of all of this, I am currently writing my first paper with the lab that will hopefully be submitted by the end of the summer! 
 
The reason for sharing all of this is not only to introduce myself, but to lead into the main topic of this blog post. I am an athletically motivated individual, and I strongly believe in a work-life balance. While I deeply enjoy academics and am grateful to be in the position I am, I always make sure to have an outlet that is separate from academia. After the long days of writing and reading papers, all I want to do is get on my feet and go do something that uses mainly my body rather than my brain. Ever since I was young, I’ve always been really athletic. I played soccer, volleyball, ran track and field and cross country, and just enjoyed being active in general. Now that I am a busy adult, finding time to be active is difficult, but it makes my quality of life so much better that I make sure to find time most days of the week to do something that moves my body. For a few years now I have been into weightlifting, which I aim to do three days a week. When I am not lifting in the gym, I am in the climbing gym 3x a week! I have been climbing for just over two years, and I am so thankful I found this sport. Climbing is fun and relaxing but also has such a strong community that I really enjoy being a part of. I have been able to meet so many people and make so many friends because of this sport, and it is extremely important to me to have spaces to meet people as it becomes increasingly difficult as an adult to do so as I get older. Human connection is something I seriously value in my life, and I can foster this through the athletic activities I participate in. 
 
For some reason, people in the climbing community constantly recruit their non-climbing friends to join climbing. I am one of those people. Since joining PVL I was repeatedly asking my lab-mates to come climbing with me. Some of them were eager to climb, while others I eventually wore down <3. This marked the first official PVL climbing outing. Those from the group able to make it out to Basecamp in downtown Toronto got to experience a fun evening of climbing, specifically bouldering! Bouldering is a style of climbing that does not involve ropes or harnesses where routes are set around 15 ft off the ground at their highest point. Mats cover the floor to break your fall, but proper falling technique is still a must-know before getting on the wall! Routes are organized by level of difficulty and use a V-grading system. Often, V0 is the easiest climb, with climbs getting progressively more difficult as the number increases. My lab mates absolutely rocked (pun intended) at our climbing session! While climbing obviously involves strength and endurance, it is 100% a mental sport as well. I have had to overcome mental blocks when attempting a problem which has only made me a stronger climber, and a more confident person. 
 
Getting to enjoy my favourite sport with my new lab mates was a really fulfilling experience as it allowed me to share something I love, and I had the opportunity to build stronger relationships with people I work alongside every day! Please enjoy the group picture from the evening above :)

Swapping Mars for Exoplanets: My Time at Harvard University

Providing graduate students with a range of experiences is a key part of helping them figure out what they want to do and where they want to do it once they have completed their degrees. Sometimes that means visiting another university lab, or working for a government agency or finding out what it means to join a team in the industrial sector. For much of the year, PhD student Grace Bischof has been investigating these questions in the lab of Robin Wordsworth at Harvard University.

by Grace Bischof 

Last summer, I received an email telling me that I was eligible to apply to the Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement, funded through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). This supplement designates money for graduate students to partake in research internships at institutions abroad to help build global connections. Immediately after receiving the email, I excitedly emailed John to ask if we could talk about possible researchers that I could reach out to about this opportunity to see if they would be interested in having me in their lab for a few months.

At the top of the list of researchers I was interested in connecting with was Dr. Robin Wordsworth at Harvard University. During my time interning at JPL, one of Robin’s papers formed part of the basis for the work I was doing there, so I became familiar with some of his research. About a year later, I saw Robin give two fantastic talks about the environment of Mars at LPSC and the 10th International Conference on Mars. Ironically, though the two talks I’d seen by Robin had been about Mars, and my research at York for the past ~5 years has been about Mars, Robin does not primarily do research on the Martian atmosphere. Though Mars makes up a portion of his research, he also works extensively on modelling the atmospheres of exoplanets. So, for the first time, I wrote and submitted a proposal for research outside of the solar system, characterizing the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets through Lyman-alpha transit spectroscopy.

I learned in late December that my proposal was successful and by the first week of February I was on a plane, flying to Boston, Massachusetts. Unlike the winter of 2023 that I spent in sunny Pasadena happily skipping the cold Toronto winter, Boston has a similar climate to home. Upon landing, I was greeted with below zero temperatures and several inches of snow on the ground. I took a cab to my new home in Cambridge (where Harvard is located), which is just across the Charles River from Boston, feeling equal parts excited and anxious about the next few months ahead of me.

Luckily, I soon learned that I had I little to be anxious about. Though I had never researched atmospheres other than Mars’, I loved the project I was working on (and will write a blog post detailing it later on!). At the beginning of the internship, it felt like I had a mountain of literature to read and understand to even grasp the basics of the project, but I chipped away at it slowly, finding a new love for exoplanetary science. Everyone in Robin’s group was extremely friendly and thoughtful – I learned a lot listening to them talk about their research. Going into this experience, I didn’t think I could enjoy an area of research as much as I love Mars, but I am very pleased to have discovered something new that I find so fascinating. 

One of the best things about working at Harvard is the stunning campus, with its gorgeous centuries-old buildings. A favourite location of mine on campus was the Harvard Museum of Natural History, which also encompasses the Geological and Mineralogical Museum, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Harvard University Herbaria, as well as the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. My office was on the upper floor of the Geological Museum, so I was greeted by walls of gorgeous rocks and minerals every day. With a student ID, I was able to get in for free and roam around the floors of these museums. I took lots of pictures of the dinosaur fossils and bones for my 3-year-old nephew, Tate, who is a dinosaur fanatic. My favourite part of the museum was the comparative zoology section, where there are taxidermized animals of every kind you can imagine from all over the world – I kept finding it so fascinating to think that people in Australia would think seeing a kangaroo is as mundane as we find seeing a squirrel in Toronto. 

Under the bones of a Steller’s sea cow, while admiring the giraffe on my right

Since it was my first time in Massachusetts, I spent some time exploring the Boston area with friends and family who came to visit. We walked the Freedom Trail, visiting historic Boston sites like the Paul Revere House, Granary Cemetery where some of the American Founding Fathers are buried, and boarded the U.S.S Constitution, which is the world’s oldest commissioned warship that is still afloat. When my dad visited, we rented a car and spent a morning wandering the streets of Salem, learning more of the Witch Trials that plagued the town in the 1600s. That afternoon, we drove to Concord and visited the Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote and set the novel Little Women. The 2019 film adaption of Little Women is one of my favourite movies of all time, so exploring the home that inspired the novel was an experience I won’t forget!

 

 Outside of the Orchard House where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women 

Before I knew it, it was June 1st, and I was packing my bags to fly back home to Toronto after four incredible months at Harvard. One thing to know about my academic journey while reading this blog is that getting to grad school was not necessarily the easiest for me. Though I loved the content of my undergraduate degree in physics and I worked hard at it, my grades were certainly not the best. When John accepted me into PVL in 2020, he was taking a real chance on me. All that to say: I never thought I would spend any time at an institution as prestigious as Harvard, let alone feel like I belonged there and was proud of the work I was doing. This internship helped me grow confidence in myself both personally and professionally. Five years ago, when I started grad school, I wouldn’t have believed I would gain that confidence, so I am beyond lucky and grateful for this experience – and especially for my experience in PVL which got me here in the first place.

Unravelling Martian Methane Mysteries in the Canadian Arctic

An image of our ABB methane detector deployed at Gypsum Hill on Axel-Heiberg Island in Nunavut. Alex's work here showed that the variability in a measured methane signal might be able to tell us more about our distance from the source than the total amount of methane does. This is important for how we might prospect for methane seeps on Mars. 

Oh, and look at that view!
Sometimes it's not just the results of our investigations that take our breath away.

by Alex Innanen

Almost three years ago now (and wow, time really flies) I spent three weeks in Nunavut, which you can read all about here. I talked a little in that post about why I went up and what sort of work I was doing there. But the work did not end when I landed back in Ottawa (or got back to Toronto after an extended weekend at the cottage). No, I then spent the next several months going “I guess I need to write this up in a paper somehow.” This was complicated by a few things – the fact I hadn’t ever written a paper based on fieldwork (nor read many), the fact that the results were not super clear cut, and some good old fashioned procrastination. But I ended up presenting the work a few times, including at my yearly research evaluation meetings and at a couple conferences, and it started to come together into some kind of story.
 
When I took methane measurements, I let the instrument ingest the air passing over for ten minutes, and the instrument took a measurement every second over this time period. This meant I ended up with what I took to calling a ‘spiky plot’ of hundreds of methane measurements over that ten-minute period. I noticed two things in these ‘spiky plots’. The first was that I could find the average methane concentration over that period, and that the average methane concentration tended to be highest right next to the source of the methane and drop off as I moved away downwind – typically the way you expect methane (or any gas) to work, which if nothing else meant the instrument was working. The other thing I noticed was that the variation in how spiky the spiky plot was was also higher right next to the methane source. That is to say, the methane signal varied over a much larger range when I was closest to the source, and had a much smaller range further away or upwind of the source. You can see this in the three graphs below which I took at one of the springs.

Three spiky plots. You can see that the upwind measurement has not only a lower average concentration (dashed line) but also is much, much less spiky (solid line) than the other two. Note that the y-axis is much larger on the 'Inside Wolf Spring' measurement because I saw such huge spikes of methane!

I saw this same phenomenon with the variability getting higher closer to the source even when I wasn’t moving in the exact same direction as the wind. At Wolf Spring I only moved in a (mostly) straight line in the wind direction, but at Gypsum Hill I took two sets of measurements – one along the wind direction, and one at a diagonal to the wind direction. This second set of measurements suggested that getting more data at various locations around the methane source could give us a clearer understanding of how methane behaves in a two-dimensional grid around such a source.

To that end, I sent the instrument back up to the arctic last summer in the company of an MSc student from McMaster with detailed instructions to get me a grid of measurements around Wolf Spring. My procrastination had achieved one thing – I was able to add this new dataset into my paper. And I’m glad I was! From the 2024 measurements I was able to see to impact both distance from the source and the angular distance I was from the wind direction had on the methane signal. (I’ve visualised the geometry simply below in case it’s not clear what I mean, where θ is that angular distance from the wind direction.)

Now, in 2022 I did not have any way of accurately measuring the wind direction. Instead I used a technique which is actually similar to how the Phoenix Lander did it, wherein I held up a roll of flagging tape and watched which way the wind blew it. In 2024 we were a bit more high-tech: the master’s student had access to a small weather station which gave me actual numbers for my wind direction. Knowing the position of the instrument at each measurement and the wind direction at the time of the measurement, I was able to get the distance from the source (d) and the angle of the instrument to the wind direction (θ) and combine these (d/cos(θ)) and compare this value to the average methane concentration and the variability in the measurements. I found that both fell off with increasing d/cos(θ) (or distance from the center of the methane plume), but that the variability actually fell off in a slightly more predictable way.  

Okay, you may be thinking, this is all mildly interesting but what does this have to do with planetary science? Well, as has been discussed on this blog before, there’s a lot we don’t know about martian methane. One of the unanswered questions is where it’s coming from – both in the sense of what is producing it, but of more interest to this work, the actual location from which it is being emitted. We know that we see methane plumes on Mars, but we don’t know how long they last, how the behave or, again, where they’re coming from. If we did send an instrument to Mars to investigate this, we could use what I learned in the arctic to determine what that instrument should look like and also how we should use it to find the source of these methane plumes.

I learned that the variability is a better indicator of how close we are to a methane source. The variability I saw in my spiky plots is over very short timescales, thus our hypothetical instrument should be able to make high frequency measurements to capture changes over these short timescales. I also learned that knowing the wind direction is pretty important, so our instrument should be combined with some kind of wind sensor. My measurements were taken from various locations around the methane source, so having our instrument on something that can move like a rover (or even a drone!) may be more useful than if the instrument just stands still.

There’s more I could say about this, but I don’t entirely want to spoil my paper (coming soon to an Acta Astronautica near you!). Even though it took nearly three years, it turns out there was quite a bit to learn from a few slap-dash methane measurements in the very distant north. 

To read the paper, visit: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576525003212

Poster Sessions and All That

An image (Figure 1, courtesy of Elisa) of one of the many buildings which housed the 2024 American Geophysical Union Conference in December of last year. The conference is massive, overwhelming even! Yet, it provides a venue where even disciplines with small numbers of scientists can meet and discuss their science. From Elisa: "There was no mistaking this was the place. So many poster tubes and people piled up waiting for the light to change."

 by Elisa Dong

Going to conferences… is fun! 

The attendance at conferences is a significant part of a graduate student experience. These are the places where we showcase our work, get feedback, and check out what’s up and coming in the field. Sometimes, conferences take place at exotic locales, and sometimes, they may be as mundane as “the place near the airport that is extremely inconvenient to take public transport to.” AGU 2024 fell somewhere in between, in Washington D.C., capital of the United States of America.

Given that the flight time and drive time were not too dissimilar, my boyfriend and I opted to drive down to save on costs, a very real consideration for going to conferences! While unplanned, we drove through some fascinating geological features going through Pennsylvania, dotted with various electoral signs on the way down. We stopped at a fairly mediocre cash-only brunch place, and saw snow and horses for most of the way down. Entering the city, the traffic went from a quiet one lane drive to cars changing lanes without signals, and mysterious roundabouts with confusing signage. Once at our hotel, we spent half an hour figuring out the parking situation, grabbed some food downstairs (with the best free bread we had ever had), then promptly went to bed. 

AGU is about a 5 day conference (see Day 1 in Figure 1!), and I had a poster on the first day and a presentation on the third. My presentation went well, and I was able to touch base with a coauthor of mine to confirm a few key concepts for a paper I was writing (I did this by tapping his shoulder to say hello). I had thought I would have the entire last day off to wander the city. As it turns out, there was an entire session dedicated to planetary defense and impactors that I had missed in my schedule, so I slunk back into the conference center to hear about the modelling work that was ongoing (Figure 2 shows once of the very few photos I took at the museum). 

Figure 2. Ducks at the museum! I also took photos of many many rock displays, but the local fowl section was also very cool!

It’s worth noting I met up with several other colleagues who do similar things – checking on some scientific concepts that were their specialties, sharing ideas for future works, and generally touching base. Despite running around to sessions, visiting random posters, picking up free ducky keycaps, the networking and chatting with more distant coworkers and future collaborators is one of the best things about a conference for me. Getting on a zoom call or sending an email is just not the same. 

The collaborative and productive nature of conferences was really highlighted by the poster I had up. I made the questionable choice of wearing heels that first day, anticipating being able to sit and walk around. Unlike some other conferences I had attended in the past, this poster session was huge. Having mine on the first day, I didn’t realize just how well attended it would be! 

So instead of being able to kick back and look at other posters during my session, I was glued at my poster well past the closing time and completely missed seeing an old colleague just a few posters down the aisle. I received a large amount of feedback, including kind critiques and thoughtful questions that have lingered as I consider the limitations of my work. Folks stopped by to offer resources and model simulations, encouraged me to bring up my work to a larger group (this has happened! I gave a presentation and received more positive feedback and further suggestions), and all the good stuff. I met many new people, whose names I wish I had taken down, including some who might be future reviewers of my work that gently pointed out the critical questions that I might want to consider as I continued working on the project. I explained a few concepts to a child attending the conference with family, and shared in their excitement over the awesomeness - that modelling that can help us explain our real-world observations. 

I was also happy to meet up with my previous supervisor and bring him up to speed on what I was working on, and to hear his assessment of the current state of his field and view of the conference.
Some cool things I got out of AGU 2024:

• An invitation to ask about a summer internship position (this didn’t end up working out, but it definitely expanded my thoughts)
• Meeting undergraduate students! It’s always a delight to see what cool things they’re working on, and we’ve spoken again since about work related matters
• A suggestion to present my work at an internal MSL meeting despite not working on data from the team directly
• The potential for writing a paper for a special edition (this also didn’t work out, but the procedure has been established and might be something to touch up again in the future)
• A visit to NASA Goddard! I’ve never been to a NASA Centre before, and I was able to plan it with one of my coworkers based out of there and get approvals just in time! It was great to see what folks are doing behind the scenes, the huge clean rooms with possibly over a hundred HEPA filters installed (Fig. 3), and the old-fashioned, yet extremely functional, measuring tools they used
• A late night ice-cream hangout with an online friend who forewarned me about the roundabouts
• More ice-cream and a super toasty paper fill menu on a busy Friday night when every other place was packed
• An experience (and the post-experience) at Coffee Republic. I have never enjoyed ads in my inbox so much before. The food was delightfully greasy, the coffee solid, and it was fun to hear the workers chat about their relationships candidly
• Going to the Christmas market! Two of them even!
• Barrel and Chuck, the two plushies I picked up on the way back at a Cracker Barrel. (Barrel is the lab’s new emotional support capybara, and has a lavender scented heat pack inside him! All of us in the office where he lives happen to like lavender, so it works out great. He occasionally moves from desk to desk to provide extra support)
• And, an incredible amount of useful feedback for my own work + inspiration from other projects in the future!

Figure 3. The HEPA filter wall. Incredible. What else can you spot in the room?

AGU is one of the stranger conferences out there. It is a huge conglomeration of what is really 30+ conferences that are distantly related all mashed into one location. While it makes it easy to pop into a session about say, climate change or quantum physics, it’s not necessarily planned out in a way that potentially related sessions don’t interfere. Add on thousands of attendees, and you might be feeling a bit claustrophobic and getting more exercise than planned as you trek from one building to another. Something to keep in mind. It may be better for some folks to target more niche conferences to get the same return.

We drove back as well. My eyes are still recovering from being blasted with 8 hours of dry air.