My labmates and I were at the Albany airport at 6 am for our flight to San Diego, all geared up for BPS 2020. During our transfer at the Chicago airport, a girl noticed our poster holder and asked if we were going to a conference. On talking further, we learned that her husband is presenting at BPS as well. We were still 2000 miles away from the BPS venue, and the event had already caught on to us. We looked up each other's information on the BPS app and noted which session her husband was presenting so we could connect.
Four and half hours later, we landed at San Diego. It was a brisk afternoon, a perfect weather for a walk. Coming from upstate New York, it was a welcome change. It was also collectively our first trip to San Diego. The first thing we did after settling into our hotel rooms was to call some of the restaurants on our list to make a reservation for dinner. We thought we had planned in advance by making a restaurant list. But that wasn't enough. We realized how touristy San Diego is, that it's a Friday night, a long weekend, and on top of that, it was Valentine's day! So many baes left behind at home by conference attendees. We called 3 restaurants, all of them with sea food, but none with a table available for the night. We expanded our search criteria, and finally got a reservation for dinner at Osetra's in downtown San Diego. We started with my favorite crab cake.
The second item on our list was to make our schedules of the sessions we plan to attend. I had my own long list of curiosity driven choices, and in my own field of DNA nanotechnology, I added every relevant item to my schedule check out in the next 5 days. There is no dedicated session for DNA nanotechnology in BPS yet, but there is a good number of posters in the field including DNA devices for biosensing, DNA origami mechanics, drug delivery applications of DNA motifs, structural characterization of DNA nanostructures through XFEL techniques, and DNA strand displacement reactions among others.
We are almost done with pre-gaming now. On to exciting science in the next 5 days!