Three years ago, when I started my lab, I was mostly focused on getting things running, setting up equipment, recruiting students, and turning ideas into projects. At the time, I certainly did not imagine that just a few years later I would be heading to a conference where I would be an invited speaker, chair a session, and take part in a round table discussion.
This week, I am travelling to the EMBO Workshop Proteostasis Shaping Health Span: From Protein Folding to Failure, and I could not be more excited.
What excites me most is not just any one of these things, but that I get to do all of them at the same meeting.
I have the privilege of giving an invited talk, where I will be presenting work from my lab for the first time. After three years of building the group, developing projects, troubleshooting experiments, and generating data, it feels both exciting and a little surreal to finally share our work with the proteostasis community.
I will also chair a session on proteostasis in ageing, a topic that has fascinated me for many years, and participate in a round table discussion for early career researchers. Both are opportunities I am genuinely looking forward to, not only because they allow me to contribute, but also because they create space for discussion and exchange.
And that is perhaps what I am most excited about: the conversations.
This will be my first conference as a PI, and I am looking forward to stepping away from my lab coat, robots, and endless to-do lists for a few days to talk science with colleagues, meet new people in the field, reconnect with friends, and learn from researchers whose work I have followed for years.
As a bonus, I am temporarily trading crisp Scandinavian temperatures just above freezing for around 20°C in Portugal. Apparently with some rain, but I am willing to make that sacrifice.
Here's to a week of proteostasis, ageing, great science, inspiring discussions, and hopefully many new ideas.