The Horrors Persist, But So Do I: Ella’s First Conference

In a way there were two firsts at this conference. Not only was it Ella's first major international conference (she had previously presented at two undergraduate research conferences at York) but it was also my first time at COSPAR. I had planned to attend COSPAR 2020 in Sydney and 2024 in Busan, but circumstances got in the way. I'm glad that I finally made it! After the week (10 days really) we each had, I think we'll be back and we'll be bringing other lab members with us. 
Image caption: (Left) Ella by her conference poster. The slight overhang was supported by coffee sticks and putty! (Right) John’s talk on the Microbial Survival Model for the Permanently Shadowed Regions of the Moon.

by Ella Ordinaria

One of the most exciting parts in academia is attending conferences. I finally checked this off my list when my supervisor, Dr. John E. Moores, and I attended the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Assembly 2026 in Italy. My attendance was made possible by the Canadian Space Agency’s (CSA) conference grant for students (grazie!). COSPAR took over Fortezza de Basso, a huge fourteenth-century fort in the heart of Florence. It was a nine-day long conference that attracted over 3,000 participants; although I looked forward to going to COSPAR for over a year, I was still terrified of presenting at it. 

Three days before COSPAR, my personal life turned upside down; this was definitely not how I imagined my first international conference to begin. Nevertheless, I took the flight, showed up at the fort with my oversized poster, an elevator pitch that I can recite in my sleep, and a pit in my stomach. 

My schedule was a cycle of attending planetary protection panels and planetary bodies talks, poster-hopping, tuning into special lectures, taking ten billion pictures of presentation slides before they disappeared, and frantically jotting down notes after each talk. I learned so much about the latest advances in planetary protection, and the future missions to explore the moons of Mars and Saturn were particularly exciting. And of course, the most nerve-wracking part of my schedule was presenting our work. 

I presented the Bioburden Reductions on the Orbiting Sample (OS) Container of the Mars Sample Return mission. We used a first-order numerical model to calculate the microbial survival due to the effects of space conditions such as temperature, vacuum, and UV radiation (paper is coming soon!). While I was standing beside my poster, I was hyper-conscious of the number of people walking past it. What if someone actually comes and I forget everything I’ve been working on for the past two years?! Spoiler alert: I did not. 

Prior to the conference, I spoke to Dr. Grace Bischof and Dr. Elisa Dong, former PhD students of the Planetary Volatiles Lab (PVL) for all the insider insights for your first conference. Both Grace and Elisa are mentors whom I look up to, and knowing that they too get nervous, and that they too sometimes cannot answer every question, gave me some comfort. To summarize their advice: being nervous is part of the conference experience. And then, on cue, the first person who came by my poster was John. The moment I saw my guardian angel approach me to tell me that everything is going to be fine, my vision started to unblur. As scared as I was of presenting and messing up, I was actually more scared of the possibility that nobody would come to my poster at all. And contrary to my worst imaginations, many kind, curious people dropped by! They asked meaningful questions, gave me interesting ideas, and were very respectful and supportive of the work we do. I also did a flash talk during the planetary protection panel where I briefly got to share about our project. John said it could not have gone any better, and Tim from the CSA gave me a fist bump. Yay! And at the end of each day, I returned to the hotel very exhausted yet fulfilled, inspired, and excited to do more.

Perhaps one of the best parts about COSPAR was how kind, humble, and welcoming the planetary protection community was. I spoke with distinguished scientists across the world, representatives from major space agencies (CSA, ESA, and NASA), those from industry, and even others from fields completely different from mine. I realized that no matter what stage in your academic career, most of us were there because we love science and we care about what we do. The passion from the members of PVL strongly drew me into research; seeing this same passion in the planetary science community, and at a much larger scale, was a sign that I was at the right place even if I sometimes feel that I don’t belong. I also realized I had little to worry about because anxiety and imposter syndrome are familiar enemies for many academics, and apparently, I was not the only one fighting them.

Anyway, I came to COSPAR expecting to learn about planetary science, but I didn’t expect to learn nearly as much about how to do a good presentation, how to better talk to people, and most importantly, how to think better of myself. I also owe a huge part of these realizations to the Planetary Volatiles Lab and to our awesome supervisor, John, who took a chance on me three years ago. 

(Left) Michelangelo pizza from Sapienti & Crociani – Pasticceria Ristorante Pizzeria.
(Middle) The original Michelangelo’s David displayed at the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze.
(Right) Central Florence at sunset as seen from Piazzele Michelangelo.

I would be lying if I said COSPAR was only about space research … when I wasn’t indulging in science at the fort, I indulged in Italian food. My personal favourite was Michelangelo pizza from a local pizzeria five-minutes away from my hotel, which I ate for four days straight. It was also a highlight to see the other Michelangelo – I went to the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze to see the famous oversized sculptures David and the prisoners. Speaking of museums, I went to the Museo Galileo to honour one of the most important figures in observational astronomy and modern physics; though, his preserved middle finger was much more captivating than his telescopes displayed there. 

We also had a very pleasant team Canada dinner in front of Torre di Arnolfo organized by the CSA. On my last day, John and I climbed the Piazzele Michelangelo (yes, the third Michelangelo mentioned) to watch the Florence skyline as the sun was beginning to set. And, naturally, we celebrated with what we unanimously decided was the best pistachio gelato of our lives. 

Overall, COSPAR was truly an unforgettable experience, and it was incredible to attend such a large international conference as an undergraduate student. I arrived in Florence feeling like my world had gotten smaller. And I left feeling like the real world was much bigger, crazier, and more fun than mine. 

The horrors persist, but so do I!

 Bonus Picture: Middle finger of Galileo Galilei’s right hand displayed at Museo Galileo.

Jack of All Trades, Doctor of Some

This week, our newly minted Doctor Innanen presents an essay in defence of the generalist. Once upon a time, all scientists were generalists, "natural philosophers," as they often styled themselves. Isaac Newton (pictured above examining the dispersal of light into the colours of the rainbow in John Adam Houston's illustration from 1870) was such a scientist, making contributions to mathematics, gravitation and optics, amongst other fields. But as knowledge accumulated, scientists became more and more specialized within increasingly narrow fields. Something I greatly enjoy about Planetary Science is that ours is an interdisciplinary field, borrowing and mixing from many different silos of science. 

 By Dr. Alex Innanen

We sometimes joke in PVL that when you come to the lab you will get a ton of projects thrown at you just to see what sticks. Sometimes, this will happen to you multiple times during your time here. Many of these projects stick, which is how you might end up like me – recently defending a PhD dissertation that included five (5) different projects. 

This is not always the way of doing things – you’ll often hear of PhD students with one large project or one specific area that they drill down into. Not so much in the PVL. We tend to end up more as jacks-of-all-trades. I certainly did – my dissertation ranged from martian clouds to analysing images of Newfoundland fogs to studying methane in the Canadian arctic. At least I (mostly) stuck to one planet (even my Earth-based work was used as a martian analogue). Some students in the lab end up defending on multiple planets in (or even outside of) the solar system.

For me, this gels with the way I like to work. There has been many a time when I’ve grown frustrated with the project I’m working on and have set it aside to chip away at another project. It also helps to keep things interesting. Getting bored of methane? Look at some clouds! Not the cloudy season? Plot eight Mars years’ worth of MCS temperature retrievals. 

I am like this outside of work too. I have many varied hobbies – knitting, gardening, baking, reading – that I tend to flip between depending on how I’m feeling. This is where I feel the jack of all trades, master of none adage really fits me. With all my hobbies and interests I feel like I know just enough to be dangerous. I’ll never be baking complex pastry creations or feeding myself entirely on the veggies I grow in my garden, but at least I have plenty to keep myself occupied and to relax with. 

This, I think, is where having a broad knowledge base can be useful. Even if I am not a master of all my areas of knowledge, those are still areas where I know things I may not have if I had just focused on a single area. In my work, I have a broader appreciation for and understanding of the martian atmosphere as a whole than if I had just, for instance, focused on clouds. I can also apply the deep knowledge that I do have in certain areas to others where my knowledge may be a little more surface level. This was certainly the case when I picked up Charissa’s work (linked above) analysing images of laser beams in the fog and in a laboratory setup. Because of my work looking at the scattering properties of martian clouds, I already had a lot of the baseline knowledge to pick up that project. 

But I do still have my knowledge gaps. There are things about martian clouds that I can’t tell you – for instance, I don’t really know much about the scattering properties of carbon dioxide clouds, except for in broad strokes. With methane, while I know much more now about plume variability, I don’t know a lot about methane transport within the martian atmosphere. A skill that I do feel I’ve gained from being a bit of a generalist, though, is how to find out what I need to know. Having covered such broad topics means I’ve also delved broadly into the literature and have had the opportunity to speak and work with a broad range of colleagues. I know who I’d go to if I needed to learn about methane transport in the martian atmosphere. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to answer my question, but they would likely be able to point me in the right direction. 

Part of this is certainly helped by my work on the Curiosity rover. As a member of the environmental science theme group on the rover, I’m working with other scientists who study everything from dust devils to oxygen abundance. We often share our results with each other, so I get to learn a bit of what everyone does. And I need to understand at least a bit of the science rationale behind our different observations, so that I can advocate properly for them when I’m adding them to a rover plan. 

I often joke that planetary science is five different sciences in a trench coat. Five may even be too low, with the amount of ground planetary science covers. Even just within PVL we dip into so many fields: molecular dynamics, seismology, atmospheric chemistry, astrobiology… Planetary science is a broad field, so even with my own broad background I’ve only sampled a small sliver of it. But that just means there’s plenty more out there to learn about!