As a first time attendee of the conference, I find myself a little overwhelmed by everything that I could attend. So far, I've been able to attend a lot of really interesting talks and participate in the undergraduate poster awards competition.

One of my favorite things has been getting to attend a meeting Saturday morning discussing the future of FRET. I've been an undergraduate in Hugo Sanabria's lab using single molecule FRET since my sophomore year, and it's exciting to hear pioneers of the field talk about how to continue developing this powerful method for probing protein structure and kinetics across many length and time scales.

Claus Seidel, a leader in fluorescent spectroscopy from Heinrich Heine University in Germany, began the meeting by celebrating the accomplishments of FRET, including the results of the recent FRET challenge, and highlighting the need for clear standards and better communication to continue advancing the field. The goal of the meeting was to foster community discussion with a long term perspective towards developing an integrative approach that leverages FRET in conjunction with other techniques.

Panelists Michelle Digman from the University of California Irivene, Don Lamb from Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Diane Lidke from the University of New Mexico, Sonja Schmid from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, and Thomas Peulen from the University of California San Francisco discussed phasor analysis for FRET data, the future of FRET, FRET from a user's perspective, an upcoming kinetic challenge for FRET termed the kinSoftChallenge2019, and software development for FRET data analysis.

It’s exciting for me to see how much FRET is still an actively evolving technique, and I’m looking forward to learning more about the process of developing it.