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.

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.

 

  

  

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.   

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.

The Art of Collaboration

I can't emphasize this enough: Science is a team sport! Collaborations are key to all that we accomplish at PVL. Often, the effort of trying to develop a better understanding of our solar system can be difficult or frustrating. Working with others not only makes this more fun and social, but those connections can often get you unstuck or send you down a path of discovery you didn't even know existed. All it takes is the right conversation to spark something new! Above: A view from the Nydeggbrücke, a 19th century bridge over the Aare that connects the old and new parts of Bern.

by Conor Hayes

I’ve now been with the PVL for almost five years. In that time, I’ve really come to appreciate the power of a collaboration, particularly with people outside of the lab. I first got a taste of this following the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) in 2022. There, I was presenting some of the work that I had been doing as part of my Master’s thesis. In that work, I was examining how small-scale terrain may influence surface temperatures in the Moon’s permanently-shadowed regions (PSRs) in ways that we can’t currently observe from orbit. To do so, I was using a “Gaussian rough surface” to represent the interior of a PSR. While Gaussian roughness is a decent model for planetary surfaces over smaller regions, it’s a simplified model as it ignores larger structures like craters.

After my presentation, I got a DM on the conference’s Slack workspace from David Minton, an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University. In his message, he told me that he had been developing a Cratered Terrain Evolution Model (CTEM) that can create realistic lunar terrains at small scales, and asked if I would be interested in collaborating. Over the next several months, we merged his CTEM outputs with my illumination and temperature models to create a paper that was significantly better than the version that was in my Master’s thesis.

This past February, another collaboration offered a new experience to me. During my PhD, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the transport of volatile molecules like water across the lunar surface. One of the more popular models for doing so assumes that molecules undergo a series of thermally-driven jumps across the surface until they are either destroyed or trapped by cold temperatures. The temperature required for one of these jumps to begin is determined by a parameter known as the “desorption activation energy.” It is arguably the most important component of the model, but its value is not well understood, particularly if you want to look at molecules other than water.

There are several ways that one can attempt to determine the value of a molecule’s activation energies, but nobody at PVL has the expertise or the equipment necessary to do so. We could just use the values in the literature while making note of their limitations, but I didn’t feel like that was the right approach. Instead, we’ve been working with Liam Morrissey and his team at Memorial University on molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of desorption, which can be used to estimate the activation energies for various molecules on different surfaces without having to put together a complex experimental setup.

As part of this collaboration, I was invited to participate in a workshop at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland. This workshop was the first meeting of ISSI’s Multi-Scale Understanding of Surface-Exosphere Connections (MUSEC) International Team. At this point in my graduate career, I’ve been to many conferences, so I thought that I knew what I was getting into. It didn’t take long for my expectations to be proven entirely incorrect.

What rapidly became apparent was that a workshop is a much more collaborative environment than a conference. Rather than a rigid schedule of short talks and even shorter Q&A sessions, each presentation was more like a conversation between all the attendees. About half an hour was given to each person, not because they were expected to speak for that long, but to give ample time for discussion during and after each talk.

I had been worried because I was coming in without many actual results. Instead, the presentation I had prepared was mostly a listing of open questions that I would like to address in the final version of my model. Not exactly the kind of content that would attract much attention at a conference, but I had been assured that it was appropriate for a more informal venue such as this one. Still, I was haunted by the ever-present specter of imposter syndrome, particularly as a last-minute addition to a group of people who were already familiar with each other.

After the week’s agenda had been updated to include me, I noticed that 45 minutes had been allocated for me. Before I began, I joked that I we would definitely be taking our afternoon coffee break early, as I couldn’t imagine a world in which my set of questions could possibly consume that amount of time. As it turns out, if you start listing unanswered questions in a room full of people with the expertise to answer those questions, it inspires a lot of discussion. I was told afterwords that my presentation was exactly the kind of content that this workshop had been designed to focus on, which was very reassuring to hear given my initial uncertainty about whether I should be there at all.

Outside of the workshop itself, the MUSEC leadership made an effort to foster a sense of community with group lunch and dinner outings, which allowed everyone to get to know each other outside of our work. It didn’t take more than a day or so before I stopped feeling like an outsider. Bern itself is a beautiful city, and I hope to be able to explore it more during the next in-person MUSEC workshop next year (if writing my dissertation isn’t consuming too much of my time by then!). 

 The aftermath of a successful workshop: a completely inscrutable whiteboard.

 

Rodeos and Regolith: A Week at LPSC 2025

The PVL crew at LPSC 2025 in The Woodlands, Texas. From left to right, we have MSc students Milena and Abby followed by PhD students Conor and Alex. There's nothing like your first scientific conference! (I still remember LPSC 2004 fondly.) Below, Milena Markovich, one of our new MSc students reflects on their experience this past March.

 by Milena Markovich

Running through Toronto Pearson Airport a punctual three hours before my flight, I could hardly focus on where I was going. Making my way through security, I placed all my items and luggage on the conveyor belt, running on autopilot. My mind was racing with anticipation, a perfect storm of excitement and anxiety. When I finally arrived at my gate, I double checked the display by the desk – destination: Houston, Texas. I settled into my seat and began some last-minute marking before I would eventually arrive at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. 

Once Abby arrived at the gate, we began discussing the conference in an excited flurry. What would it be like? Would our poster sessions go well? Which sessions and speakers were we most excited for? In a coincidence which perfectly exemplifies the small world of planetary science, sitting across from us was a former colleague of our supervisor: Dr. Livio Tornabene. After some friendly conversation, I asked Dr. Tornabene if he had any advice for a first-time conference goer like myself. His advice echoed in my mind for the entire week ahead – remember to take breaks, there’s so much going on that you can’t possibly “do it all”.

Although this was fantastic advice, after my first day at LPSC 2025 I realized I would certainly have a problem following this piece of advice. Sitting in on sessions exploring the icy moons of Jupiter, the minerology of Mars and astrobiology, I knew this was a learning opportunity of which I could not miss a single second. What followed was a week of 7AM mornings, quick jogs across the Macy’s parking lot to make it to the first session of the day, and long evenings spent meeting other graduate students, exploring The Woodlands and even Houston.  

The welcoming nature of everyone I met was a warm embrace into the planetary science community. In Texas of all places, so far from home and campus, I encountered other graduate students from York University. Through quick chats between sessions and social bar nights with loud “cheers!” going around, I gained a deeper sense of community. I met other students and scientists from across the world – offering friendly conversation at lunches, fascinating discussions about their research and helpful doses of career advice and mentorship.

In between the lecture presentations, bonus workshops and poster sessions I spent many hours walking the canal by the conference hotel with lab-mates, exploring local restaurants (failing miserably to order a sufficient amount of barbecue for three people), even managing an excursion to the Houston rodeo. From experiencing Cracker Barrel for the first time or exploring the wacky food booths at the Houston rodeo with my newfound friends, I gained so many wonderful memories outside the conference hall. This attitude of never saying “no” to a restaurant, extra session, or fun field trip allowed me to develop friendships with York students I had hardly seen around campus, and with other scientists from across the country, continent and world.

Thus, it seems I went directly against Dr. Tornabene’s advice. That is certainly not to say that his advice was not perfectly sound – however, as a first-year graduate student surrounded by the passionate, excited and welcoming nature of this community for the first time, this advice seemed equally impossible for me to follow.

Following discussions of LPSC 2025 being the last LPSC conference in this capacity, I knew I had done the right thing by trying to soak up as much of the experience as I possibly could. While career paths can be winding – starting and stopping at different destinations than we may expect – my time spent immersed in the planetary science community has been both professionally fulfilling and has provided me with many treasured moments with friends. I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in this conference, both by presenting my research at the poster session and absorbing all the fantastic work being done in planetary science, while building meaningful relationships and connections within the community. 

Throughout my week at LPSC 2025 I learned much more than I could have hoped. From presentations on the geophysics of Mars and icy moons to lunar volatiles and minerology. Of equal value, I learned what a country steak is, had fried okra for the first time and experienced the epic highs and lows of a Texan rodeo. At the end of the day, there are indeed times when we all make the mistake of not following perfectly good advice. Returning home from Houston exhausted, yet full of knowledge, inspiration and fond memories, I’m glad I made that mistake.

A Niche Conference?

 Being at a conference is like being thrown in the deep end; it's like drinking from a fire-hose; it's so unlike anything else in academia that water-based analogies just don't describe it accurately! It's an even more impactful experience if we're talking about your first scientific conference or your first time diving into a new field where unexpected connections can be made (e.g. discovering a new kind of Phoenix!). This week, Kevin shares his experience of attending a planetary science conference with a narrow scope: the 10th Mars Conference.

by Dr. Kevin Axelrod

Back in July of this past year (which is 2024, for those of you reading this in the future), the Planetary Volatiles Laboratory of York University traveled to Pasadena, California to attend and present at the 10th Mars Conference, hosted by Cal Tech and organized by USRA. This conference is not held every year, usually just once or twice a decade and therefore had some big-shot attendees from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere. In total there were nearly a thousand participants.  Given that it talks about the study of a single non-Earth planet in the universe, I considered it to be niche - something that is highly specialized, highly technical, and extremely important to some but obscure to many.

So, coming from an Earth-oriented atmospheric sciences background (I got my Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences, and my research focused on bioaerosols) at first, I found it very difficult to fit in.  In just about every single conversation, (including with graduate students, who are supposedly “less experienced” than a postdoc) I found myself to be the least experienced participant. Typically, the other person did 99% of the talking, and, when responding to someone, I would just say stuff like “Okay”, “Hmm… interesting”, “I see”, “Alright, sounds good”, and “Cool”. I had difficulty contributing meaningful thoughts to conversations because I simply did not know enough.

I immediately noticed something in an opening plenary given by one of the keynote speakers, someone highly experienced that I would think of as a “big-shot.” In his presentation, he discussed a measurement technique and the missions that have performed these measurements. Then, in the question session, a member of the audience playfully ridiculed him for not including a shout-out of the Phoenix lander for a similar measurement that it had performed.  He genuinely apologized, stated that he is a “big fan” of the Phoenix lander, and that its exclusion was an oversight.

Meanwhile, I sat there thinking: “Hmmm… Phoenix.  To me, Phoenix is a city in Arizona, a bird in Harry Potter, and the mascot of a professional ultimate frisbee team based in Philadelphia (above).” Don’t ask me how I somehow know that third one. 

This was one of many instances where I felt like I should have signed up to be the guy filling the water coolers instead of an actual presenter. Other scientists there seemed to know every single Mars mission like the back of their hand – something that I should study more.  People there knew all the important (and more obscure) studies, both legacy and recent.  

Niche conferences are nothing new to me: back in 2023 I attended a conference called the International Conference on Carbonaceous Particles in the Atmosphere, at Berkeley. There perhaps 150 participants (given its small size, John might call this a “workshop”, not a conference), and the title said it all.  Carbonaceous Particles in the Atmosphere was the only topic discussed.  I did my Ph.D. on bioaerosols, so my research fit in perfectly with this conference, and there were many other scientists there who were also doing work on bioaerosols.  

I talked with these people like we were equals: I knew what they were talking about and vice versa.  But, even in a “niche” conference like this, with relatively few attendees and a narrow range of subject material, there were also several presentations that struck me as completely new – things I have not researched before, worked on, heard of, or imagined.  While I vibed with a good number of presentations, there also were many presentations that were so new to me that I was completely lost by the second slide in the slide show – giving me the feeling that I was having at 10th Mars in Pasadena. Even in a conference where I have a good grasp of much of the research, there was still plenty of research that made me feel like a “newbie”.

Remembering this conference, I now realize that there may not exist a conference that is too niche. Even when narrowing down the range of topics, science is still extremely broad, and even more extremely detailed.  Because of this, I find it difficult to call myself an “expert” in a broad field like atmospheric sciences, even though I have a Ph.D in this topic.

So, 10th Mars reminded me of something critical: the most important skill in a scientific career isn’t knowing everything there is to know in a field. It is the ability to push outside of your comfort zone and learn new things. Even though you may have a Ph.D, you can never stop being a student. Even though 10th Mars was perhaps a bit uncomfortable for me (because of my relative lack of experience in the field compared to other participants), I learned more material in those four days than maybe I ever had before in a four-day span.

The message of this blog post is this: I would highly recommend all early-career scientists to not just attend conferences in your field of expertise, but conferences that are slightly (or more than slightly) outside of your area of expertise. And to be honest, middle- and late-career scientists should probably be doing the same as well. It will challenge you to learn new things, meet new collaborators, and in doing so conceptualize new ideas for research that you may never have had if you had just stayed in your typical lane – the one that you were trained in when you did your M.S. or Ph.D.  

A few final thoughts:
1.    I need to find a way to drag some other members of the PVL out to a conference with more Earth-based atmospheric sciences!  I guess the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting in Washington DC is a good place to start (three of us were there last year!).
2.    “Phoenix” now includes the name of a NASA Mars lander from 2008 as a definition in my brain-dictionary!

More conference talk. Suddenly stuck at home? Make the best of it!

We had all hoped to be in person at this year's DPS, however, the hybrid nature of the conference meant that any students who had last minute disruptions could still attend virtually. It's really nice to be able to accommodate these sorts of situations and, while the online experience is not the same as the in-person experience, it means that someone who has made arrangements and already paid their registration can still get some value out of the conference, perhaps even more value than they had expected as our new PhD student Elisa Dong attests below. For more on the picture above, see the Caption at the bottom of the article.

 by Elisa Dong

New PhD student (Elisa) checking in with the usual readers of this blog. This week I've been invited to discuss whatever I so desire on the blog. I happened to be writing something for my own blog on attending conferences. Here are a series of mostly serious tips for attending conferences remotely, when the format is hybrid and all your friends are attending in person. The backdrop for this conference was DPS, on which Conor has recently posted. A lot of these tips have been test-run during the pandemic where I attended AGU online.

Tips for attending a scientific conference (when you're remotely at a hybrid event):
1.     Identify your favourite conference snacks and drinks
2.     Purchase, make, or make student-budget friendly versions of said snacks and drinks
3.     Plan chores that require at most 1 hour of your time. Preferably a bunch of 10-15 minute chores
4.     Acquire bluetooth headphones
5.     Identify some clothes for dressing up (or down)
6.     Pick a few "key" sessions you want to be awake for and some interesting ones to pad out the rest of your time.
7.     Chat with your lab mates on your preferred communication method of choice.

Let's break these down a bit. Say you were really looking forward to attending the conference in person and had already planned for those days to be away. However, you've fallen sick or some event has taken place that prevents you from attending. You might as well try to get part of the conference experience at home! While there will be significantly less mingling with others and networking opportunities will be, at best, awkward and stilted you can still delight in the little snack breaks while reflecting on the state of the field.

This brings us to tip number 1. If you've been to a conference before, what snacks did you enjoy during the breaks? Personally I like that there are usually several tea options, and sometimes the coffee is palatable. The previous conference I had attended online (planned), I had the time to order some coffee samples and pick up a variety of snacks from the asian supermarket. This time I was stuck in quarantine, so I made sure I had a kettle and a massive stock of tea bags. This covers tip number 2 as well. It doesn't have to be fancy, but having the ability to make hot drinks on demand is quite nice. It's reminiscent of downing drinks to soothe your throat in the dry, conference room air.

Tip number 3 and 4 involve keeping yourself busy. Unlike an in-person conference, there are very few things you can look at that you are unfamiliar with. You likely won't have access to the attendees (no camera facing that way, zoom only shows the speakers) so figuring out who else is at that session is out unless they speak up during Q&A. Instead, you could be getting some mundane tasks done! I personally can't look at a screen continuously, so laundry, cleaning the kitchen, organizing bookshelves, watering/trimming plants, etc. all give me breaks away from the screen, but I'm not doing anything so critical that I can't check what's on the screen if it's particularly important. Tip 4 gives you the flexibility to move around without fear of wires tangling or blasting the audio (less of an issue if you don't have roommates, but still a nice option). Earphones are also an option, but I find headphones to be a bit better with universal fitting. Also, you now have the wonderful ability to choose to go to the bathroom while still listening to the sessions.

It's all good to be perfectly cozy while stuck at home (or if you're so inclined, going outside while still plugged into the conference). A big part of the conference experience is being present though. For me, that means dressing in a slightly snappier manner than I normally might. Regardless, I would want to have a change of pace for "conference time", much like when working from home, it's helpful for me to dress up for "work hours". Dressing down could be a fun alternative to this though. After all, no one can see that you're in the goofiest of onesies. Similarly, no one will know (other than your housemates) that you attended in a full ballgown and mask. So that's tip 5.

Tip 6 is applicable to any conference you attend. There is only so much time in a day, so pick your favourite events to go to. Figure out what's relevant to your interests. Not much more to say about this one. Tip 7 is similarly applicable always. Should you find yourself longing for some company, or wanting to experience the social aspect of the conference, checking in with your lab mates or anyone else at the conference can be nice. If you're all together (remote or in person), it can be nice to schedule some hangout time outside of the planned events.

Lastly, it's always a good idea to tap out whenever you're feeling tired. No point attending a conference in your brain is on the fritz. A copy of these tips can be found on my personal blog (soon), abstract-ed.me, where I will likely keep posting silly little pseudo-articles on science and whatever catches my interest at the time.

___

As an aside, for all potential incoming grads, here are the things that have happened in the last 2 months:
-        started taking my singular mandatory course (yay for transfer credits!)
-        met up the rest of the lab at an outdoors event and found out we're all equally bad at playing frisbee
-        confirmed that housing is as tricky as I thought it would be
-        ran into an old friend at the university!
-        had an impromptu zoom call with the founder of a company whose instruments I'm hoping to use in the near future (no spoilers!)
-        learned how to plug things into a breadboard and string things together with different communication protocols
-        moved some plants into the office, including my favourite "it's time to go home plant" (Fig. 1)
 

Figure 1 Caption. Here is my plant before I moved it to the office. The "it's time to go home plant" is an Oxalis triangularis. This purplish plant has a few relatives, but they are also referred to as "false shamrocks" when they are of the green variety. The sets of three leaves close up when the light begins to dim. This is usually my sign that I've been at work for too long during the summer months, and a reminder to start packing up during winter. I have been tricked in the past, as the leaves remain open with artificial lighting as well. They're generally pretty happy office/house plants, require moderate temperatures, nothing special in terms of humidity, and enjoy filtered light. They do grow rapidly outdoors, so don't plant them outside!

PVL in London (Ontario, That Is)

 

This week, new PVL PhD student (formerly PVL MSc student - congrats!) Conor Hayes reflects on the just completed DPS Conference that they attended a few weeks ago. This is the first time that DPS has been in person since Geneva, Switzerland in 2019 and the first time it has ever been held in Canada. I certainly appreciated being able to experience the conference together with my graduate students as a research group without even having to bring my passport!

by Conor Hayes

It has been nearly a year since I last submitted an entry to this blog, detailing my experience at GAC-MAC 2021, my first in-person conference as a grad student. Much has happened since then; I half-pivoted away from the Moon to add a new MSL-based project to my Master's thesis less than nine months before my defence, I wrote and successfully defended said thesis, and now I'm a freshly-minted PhD student here at PVL.

Some things, however, do not change, so I am here once again to talk about our latest conference experience at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS). PVL typically puts up a strong showing at DPS because we are all planetary scientists, and this was particularly true this year for two reasons. First, DPS 54 was held in London Ontario, practically down the road (relatively speaking) from us here at York. Second, PVL’s own John Moores was Chair of the Science Organizing Committee, so we couldn’t not represent our group well.

In many ways, DPS was very similar to the two in-person conferences that I was able to attend during my Master’s – GAC-MAC back in November of last year, and the 7th Mars Atmosphere Modelling and Observations conference this summer. The scientific program was divided between oral talks and poster presentations, with a plenary session in the middle of each day. I mostly stuck to the sessions on topics that I’m interested in – the Moon, Mars, and terrestrial planets, though I did attend a few that were more “out there” (at least with reference to my own research) on Europa and other icy moons, as well as sessions on citizen science, education, and public outreach.

Although it followed this familiar pattern, DPS was very much a conference of firsts for me. Because DPS was a hybrid conference this year, each session had two chairs, at least one of whom had to be in-person. One chair would make sure that each speaker stuck to their allotted time and manage questions from in the room, while the other would monitor the session’s Slack channel, where virtual attendees could ask their questions. Due to the continually evolving health situation, there were a number of in-person chairs who had to switch to virtual attendance, meaning that some sessions no longer had an in-person chair. Several members of PVL (including myself) were recruited to take their place. The session that I chaired was titled “Dynamical Dances in Space,” and featured four talks discussing gravitational interactions between various Solar System bodies, the first of which was actually based on a newly-published paper that I had read shortly before the conference. Stepping in as chair at the last minute was a little daunting because I had no idea what to expect, but it ended up being a reasonably non-stressful affair.

Much more stressful was the fact that this was the first time that I had been invited to give an oral presentation at a “major” conference. I’ve given presentations about my research before, but always in much lower-stakes settings, whether that be in PVL group meetings or at smaller conferences run by graduate students (e.g. York’s Physics and Astronomy Graduate Executive conference or the annual Lunar and Small Bodies Graduate Forum). On top of that, I had never presented the preliminary results of my lunar work to a larger group before, so there was a lot that I was worried about. Consequently, I spent a lot of time preparing my presentation and making sure that I stayed as close to the seven minute limit we were given. In the end, the magnitude of my stress was wildly disproportional to the actual event, as my presentation went smoothly and hit the seven minute mark almost exactly. Although I would have happily taken just that as a win, it has also inspired my first official research collaboration with someone outside of PVL, something that I am very excited about.

Now that I’ve had experience with both oral and poster presentations at conferences, I think I can say that I prefer oral presentations over posters. Posters certainly do have their advantages – you present all of your information on a single page and you don’t have to worry about time limits or making sure that you remember what you want to say, as posters often come with a more conversational style of sharing information. However, I’m just not really a fan of the poster experience. During a poster session, you’re sharing a room with many other people presenting their posters at the same time, so there’s a certain element of competing for the attendees’ attention. Some people can also find approaching the presenters one-on-one more intimidating than asking a question at an oral presentation (I certainly do!), which might limit the number of interactions you have. I definitely don’t want to turn people off of poster presentations; they can be a low-stress way to ease your way into the conference experience and/or to present early/preliminary results that are still in progress.

Overall, DPS was probably my favourite conference of the handful that I have attended (either virtually or in-person) over the past two years. I can only hope that the weather in San Antonio will take a break from its usual late-summer Texas heat for DPS next year.

PVL's First In-Person Conference in over 2 years

 

For many academics, we can point to a moment when everything just clicked and we realized that this life was for us.  Often, that moment occurs at a conference. Conferences give you the chance not just to present your own work to others, but to learn what they are doing and to ask each other questions. There are social events and networking opportunities that can help your career. Even moments of inspiration. But most of all, it's about being immersed in the intellectual life of the field to which you have devoted yourself. I'm sorry, but virtual and on-line conferences just can't compare. The new MSc students, unfortunately, had spent their entire careers in the virtual world, at least until a few weeks ago.
(Image above courtesy of Conor Hayes and Western University Earth Sciences)

by Conor Hayes

With nearly all of my Masters spent online, my graduate school experience has certainly not been exactly what I imagined when I began applying during my last year of undergrad. The group here at the Planetary Volatiles Lab has played a big role in keeping me sane over the last 15 months or so (and was indeed a significant reason why I accepted John’s offer to join PVL in the first place!). Though we’re still not yet in the clear, it’s starting to look like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. If all goes to plan, York will be transitioning back to in-person classes this January, hopefully bringing back some sense of normalcy to this very strange period in our collective history.

While some aspects of the “typical” grad school experience, like colloquia and journal clubs, have survived the online transition fairly well, one big part has not fared quite as well: conferences. Since starting at York, I have attended several online conferences, including the Physics and Astronomy Graduate Student Conference, the Lunar and Small Bodies Graduate Forum (LunGradCon), and the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC). Though I lacked a proper reference, having never attended a conference during undergrad, these online conferences seemed a bit “hollow”, for lack of a better term, without the kind of “realism” that comes with face-to-face interaction.

For this reason, I was excited (and a little bit nervous) to learn that we would be attending the annual joint meeting of the Geological and Mineralogical Associations of Canada, more efficiently known as GAC-MAC. On its face, this might seem like an unusual conference for our group to attend, since we are neither geologists nor mineralogists. However, we had been invited to help contribute to a special session, titled “Remote Sensing of the Earth and Planets” (and contribute we certainly did).
 
I have been told that submitting an abstract to a conference can be a good motivator to get work done, and that was certainly the case here. The month leading up to GAC-MAC was a frenzy of activity as I prepared results to present, and I’m pretty certain that I was more productive in the last half of October than I was in the previous six months combined. I was assigned a poster presentation by the conference organizers, which was a new challenge for me. I wanted it to be relatively self-explanatory while not being stuffed full of tiny text, so I eventually settled on adding a QR code that linked to a website where I wrote up the details of my project in much greater detail than the poster’s limited space would allow. (Ultimately, only one person ended up scanning that QR code, but I still view the website as good practice for when I eventually have to write my thesis.)

The conference itself took place from November 2nd to November 5th at Western University in London, Ontario. It was a relatively small affair, with a few hundred in-person attendees. Oral presentations were organized into six themed tracks: Tectonics and the Precambrian, Geoscience and Society, Mineralogy, Earth and Planetary Processes, Resource Geoscience, and Life and the Environment. I, along with most of the rest of PVL, stuck with Earth and Planetary Processes, both because it was the track in which our presentations were placed in and it was the one with which we were most familiar. Perhaps it was a missed opportunity not to explore the other tracks, but I found that the presentations generally assumed a certain level of background knowledge that I definitely do not have in any of the other areas, so I probably would have been hopelessly lost.

A particular highlight were the three plenary lectures, which seemed to be geared towards a more general audience than the quick 15-minute oral presentations. Though they were quite lengthy, I did not find my attention wandering elsewhere, which was quite impressive given that I frequently have difficulty focusing on any one thing for an extended period of time. The Thursday lecture, which was given by Dr. Robert Hazen on his work developing an evolutionary system for mineralogy, was my favourite of the three, as it combined mineralogy (something that I have essentially no background in) with planetary evolution and the history of the universe (which I am much more familiar with) to create a unique way of classifying minerals in a more meaningful way than the current standards.

Going into my poster session Thursday evening, I didn’t really know what to expect. I was a bit nervous because, unlike an oral presentation where you have a quasi-captive audience, there was no guarantee that anyone would be interested in hearing what I had to say about my work, particularly given that most of the other attendees were doing very different work than I was. Despite this (and perhaps because of it), I still had lovely conversations with five or six people, most of whom admitted that they knew nothing about lunar PSRs and let me info-dump on them. In a way, it reminded me of my favourite outreach projects, where I get to talk about the things that I love with people who don’t necessarily immerse themselves in those things on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, outside of our respective presentations, there was not much interaction between PVL members and the other attendees. This could be blamed on the fact that most of the social activities were, due to COVID restrictions, held outdoors, where we were greeted by an uncomfortable and unseasonal chill. That did not stop us from holding our own events though, whether that be meals together (either inside or outside of the hotel) or just existing in the same room as a group.

I don’t know if I came away from GAC-MAC with a much more comprehensive knowledge of either geology or mineralogy than I went in with. I still think this was a successful conference though, and not just because of how well our presentations went. Even if it was just for four days, being able to see the other lab members as more than a head in a box on a screen reminded me of how much I miss being around other people. Going back to Zoom group meetings has been a bit melancholic as a result, but I am hopeful that we’ll all be able to work together again before I graduate.

7 out of 10 PVL Group members at GAC-MAC

So, what’s it like researching in the PVL!?

This week Ariella reflects on her time spent with the lab over the summer as a TEPS fellow. Above, she is pictured at the Lassonde Undergraduate Research Conference alongside Noah Stanton, another of our Summer Researchers. We wish her well as she enters into her final year of her undergraduate career and sets her sights on what lies beyond!

By Ariella Sapers

Over the last 4-5 months I’ve spent my time being an undergraduate researcher for the Planetary Volatiles Laboratory at York University, which was a huge change to my previous research experience.

I’m used to staring at stars in my previous research projects - but now, it was all about Mars! For starters, I did not realize the amount of incredible Mars research that is done in this lab ... and worldwide. I was very naive before I started - as my head had always been stuck in astrophysics research – so I didn’t realize the cool research that’s conducted in the Planetary Sciences! Before this, the only experience I had was a Planets and Planetary Systems course taught at York University by Dr. John Moores, which is what intrigued me in the first place.

This research experience didn’t just let me work in a cool lab ... I got to attend two conferences throughout the summer. The first was the TEPS conference. This conference was the Technologies for (Exo) Planetary Sciences which allowed all award holders to come for a three-day conference. TEPS is an NSERC CREATE Program that allows undergrads, masters, PHD and Post Docs to be trainees. I was lucky enough to have received one of these awards which officially made me a TEPS Trainee! This meant I got to attend the TEPS conference and meet a lot of Planetary Scientists. The vast amount of research being conducted on Mars, exoplanets and the moon is incredible. It also showed me what masters students and PhD students are working on - since I’m close to graduating, it was nice to see the endeavours of graduate students.  

AGU 100th Fall Meeting

 The pause in blog posts here is entirely my fault - I've been on sabbatical travelling in the South Pacific and have a backlog of three to post, so look for even more tales of trials, tribulations and triumphs from the members of PVL in the coming days! We kick off the new year with Dr. Paul Godin's trip to the 2018 AUGFM. Above is Paul's photo of the AGU 100 sign at that Meeting.

by Dr. Paul Godin

The fall meeting of the American geophysical union (AGU) is one of the largest scientific conferences in the world, attracting over 10,000 attendees. This year they celebrated their 100th meeting; and it was my first time attending. The fall meeting was traditionally held in San Francisco, but due to on going renovations of the San Francisco Moscone Convention Centre, the meeting has been moving around America. AGU 100 was held in Washington D.C., so while I didn’t get to enjoy the warmth of San Francisco, I did get to enjoy visiting the American Capitol (luckily the meeting was before the shutdown, so everything was open for tourists at that time).