Adventures In Foreign Lands

So, just before all of the excitement of the last month came crashing down on me, I got a chance to spend a week in Oxford, England, at a research conference. It was a tremendous opportunity, and good fun all around.

It was the Gordon Research Conference on Vitamin B₁₂ and Corphins, and was a really cool opportunity to present my research to a lot of big name scientists and do a whole lot of networking. More on that later. The coolest thing about it was the venue: Magdalen College (pronounced "Maudlin") at Oxford University.

The way Oxford works is that the University sets the curriculum and owns a lot of labs and teaching facilities, but the students live in individual colleges, which are formally independent from the university. Magdalen isn't the oldest college at Oxford by far, but it has been there since the mid-1400's. The architecture is stunning. Here I am in front of the college chapel, which has really neat monochromatic stained glass and a 15th century copy of the Last Supper inside.

This is the New Building, where Oscar Wilde lived when he was a student here. There were students playing croquet on the lawn at one point during the week. I swear, the grass is cut to the point where it's never more than a half an inch long. The grounds staff are mad.

We were put up in some 17th century houses which had been renovated recently as undergraduate dormitories. They were all right, and made up 3 sides of a nice little brick courtyard:

The fourth side was a chunk of the medieval city wall:

The way the Gordon Conferences work is that for a solid week, scientists in a certain specialized field get together to present unpublished and exciting work in that field. The big names and heavy hitters get longer talks, and some junior folks get invited to give shorter talks, in this auditorium here:

I was really honored to give a 15 minute talk on my project, although it was a little disheartening to find that I can, in fact, sum up 5 years of work in 15 minutes. It seemed to be very well received, though. I got a lot of questions, and had several people come up and want to talk science afterwards, which was pretty exciting. I think I may have promised to do some experiments for Bernhard Kraütler (the organizer of the meeting), but I'm not completely sure...

They scheduled the meeting in a really nice way. There was a morning session from 9 to noon and an evening session from 7 to 9, with poster sessions in the late afternoon. The middle of the day was free for touring around town, which was great. Oxford is a fantastic city, and I recommend it to anyone.

We went to a bunch of places, including Oxford Castle (a functioning prison from ~1200 until 1985, now a museum):

and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which was amazing:

I also had some nice morning walks around the grounds of Magdalen - very restful after long days of thinking hard and networking. It's hard to be "on" for a week straight.


In between science and tourism, the conference also fed us pretty well. We ate at the Magdalen dining hall, which was somewhat familiar...


I probably gained 5 pounds. An exercise regime of eating a big meal, sitting on your butt for 3 hours, eating a big meal, wandering in a antique-induced daze, eating a big meal, sitting on your butt for 3 hours, then going out for late nights of beer-fueled nerdery for a week takes it out of a guy, I'll tell you.

I'd do it again in a minute. Makes me think maybe I'm in the right line of work.