The one at the end of the day, who is apparently New Zealand's Chief Scientist, presented to us a lecture about the possible evolutionary origins of aging in humans, to help discuss why humans live so long and why our bodies seem to encounter new challenges towards the end of life. Contrary to popular belief, many humans in the "caveman times" did often grow older than you'd think, into their 50s/60s/70s. Average life expectancies were very low only because of child mortality; if you lived to be 18, you stood a quite good chance of living longer. His interest was in trying to explain why for evolutionary reasons our ancestors who had aging accompanied by a largely poorer physique did better than the ones who did not see these problems, with a particular interest in why humans (but almost no other mammals, besides elephants and dolphins) undergo menopause.
Yep, it was an interdisciplinary conference. In fact, it was basically a non-disciplinary conference. There's a bit more available on the conference's website.
Part of the reason for that was why the conference existed in the first place. The conference was set up by Universitas 21, a sort of football conference for academia. Basically, it's a bunch of schools who consider themselves academic equals deciding to get together and chat about international collaborations and such. One of their initiatives is a graduate student conference, held every summer at one of the member schools. The conference is intentionally given only a very vague topic, such that as many schools as possible could present something somehow related to the topic. This year's topic was aging, and, as it so happens, I had one experiment related to aging; hence submitting my abstract, which was selected by UMD to represent our school at this conference (along with two other marvelous presentations).
I won't talk too much about the particulars of the conference, but it was clear that there were many good talks, some not-so-great-ones (sometimes speakers didn't do a great job of talking to the extremely diverse audience), but, overall, a lot of spirited discussion and fun conversation. There were also some non-talk periods where we could socialize with each other, and we were also expected to make group presentations with some other researchers around a topic that, well, pretty much none of us were supposed to have any experience with. My group presented about an issue that one of the judges had been working on for decades, in which we accidentally (and unknowingly) contradicted everything he had been doing for decades, so that went about as well as could be expected. We also got lab tours on the second-to-last day; I particularly enjoyed the robot lab we visited, which included robots that were supposed to help older adults take medicine and vital sign measures.
My presentation went pretty well. I was presenting some of my research looking at the effects of how fast you talk at the beginning of a sentence affecting the number of words you hear at the end of a sentence. I compared younger adults (18-21) with older adults (55-65) and found... no differences whatsoever. This would normally be a boring finding, but based on the previous research done in the field, it was actually pretty shocking. I think it went pretty well (some people said some nice things), but mostly I was just relieved that the audio in my presentation actually worked like it was supposed to!
Another fun bit was the keynote on the second-to-last day, who, it turned out, had been a postdoc (research scientist) for many years at UMD working in the labs of a couple of faculty that I know quite well! It was a lot of fun to talk to her about what was different at UMD and what hadn't changed. That day started with her talk, and had all three talks from PhD students at Maryland, so, needless to say, they heard a lot about how cool College Park is.
The conference schedule was quite jammed, so the only social activities I could do were those we had time for in the evening. On the first night after the conference, some of us decided to go out together closer to the harbor in Auckland, as the conference-provided dinner we thought we had been promised ended up just being appetizers and finger food. We spent a while wandering around before we found a place we could agree on - unfortunately, though, the sign said "burgers", even though I had already had burgers the night before! As we sat down, though, it turned out we had stumbled on an outdoor patio site that was split between two restaurants, one with burgers, and one with other options. Whew. I discovered that the girlfriend of one of the conferencegoers worked in a lab I had been hoping to work in when I applied for a Marshall Scholarship, and so I got to spend time talking to her about what she was doing in that lab. And, of course, the usual conference hijinx abounded... save for the copious imbibement of alcohol, as draft beers were something like $8 or $9 a pint. Yikes!
The second night, some of us went out to a Belgian restaurant that I had found on TripAdvisor (which is an amazing tool, by the way, and hasn't lied to me yet!). We all had a variety of tasty foods... but, entertainingly, and without any planning beforehand, all ordered exactly the same beer. At least it was tasty.
The next day, after our conference, we hopped on a bus to head to the Sky Tower, Auckland's local version of UFO-perched-on-a-torch architecture. (See also the Space Needle in Seattle, the CN Tower in Toronto, or the Sydney Tower in Sydney.) The top of the Sky Tower included a rotating restaurant, where we had dinner. It was, of course, inferior to Duluth's rotating restaurant, but we still got a 360-degree rotating panoramic view of the entire city of Auckland, which was pretty awesome. Our seats were assigned through unknown powers; I was fortunate enough to sit with some fun people, including the Dean in charge of running the conference, who had a PhD in New Zealand History. We then got a quiz on New Zealand history. Through, er, no help at all from the Dean, er, right, yep, totally legitimately, we managed to get the highest score on the quiz, which entitled us to a free cocktail from the bar. I got a Kiwi Bellini. It tasted like
On the way back, I sat in the driver's seat... or, at least, what would have been the driver's seat had we been in the States and had it not been a double-decker bus (me being on the second deck). I proceeded to drive the bus with vigor, aplomb, democracy, liberty, and, most of all, freedom. Those sitting around me were entertained.
Our last day was the Fourth of July. Theresa and I, being the born-and-bred Americans we are, were asked to start the day with a patriotic song. Our rendition of "America the Beautiful" went about as beautifully as you might imagine. As was put by one of the other students at the conference: "I was very impressed by how you were always at least a half-step out of tune with each other for the entire song." Yep. Oh dear. After the conference day was done, everyone said our goodbyes... what a fun conference, in the end, and what lovely people I met! Me and the others from UMD headed together to the Auckland Museum, a huge museum in the middle of Auckland's largest park. Although we only had a couple of hours there, I saw a lot of interesting things, including a wide variety of Māori artwork (the Māori are the indigenous peoples of New Zealand) and a little computer simulator that turned your body movements into simulated movements by a Pacific Island chief. I'll see if I can post the picture I took of me doing that.
I walked with Theresa and Alex (the other UMD student) towards our hotel, and we said our goodbyes. It was time for Alex to head to the airport, and for me to head to the Couchsurfing-based Fourth of July party I had been invited to. The rest of my trip was about to begin!
