Conferences

As a Ph.D. student, I have attended several fantastic conferences and workshops, both in the US and abroad! Here are some highlights:

Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) – Sacramento, California (2026). This was my first retina-centric conference and it was super nice to meet all the wonderful faculty in this field. We heard excellent talks from Jeremy Kay, Rachana Somaiya, Maureen McCall, EJ Chichilnisky, Fred Rieke, and many others. I found especially exciting and novel the talk by Daniel Palanker, who is developing subretinal implants to help restore vision in blind patients. I was suprised to hear that some patients have had these implants for over 5 years and their vision is still stable. This conference also unveiled the EyeWireII resource recently released on BioRxiv, a major resource for retinal research. This picture shows members of the EyeWireII core team and members of collaboratoring labs that reunited at the FASEB 2026 meeting.

Society for Neuroscience – San Diego, California (2025). I had a blast at this conference, where we learned about spatial navigation in freely moving human patients (Prof. Nanthia Suthana), speech production and comprehension (Prof. Edward Chang), and the current state of multiomic analysis in neurodegeneration. I participated in the “Photoreceptors and Retinal Circuitry” nanosymposium, where I gave a talk on the deep evolutionary roots of amacrine cell types.

Visual Neuroscience Workshop – Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts (2025). I attended a two-week long workshop with these wonderful folks. We took a variety of modules, including 2-photon calcium imaging from mouse, zebrafish, and octopus, patch-clamp electrophysiology, electron microscopy, and zebrafish behavior.

Berkeley Neuroscience Conference – Granlibakken Tahoe (2024). I presented a poster on the evolutionary conservation of amacrine cells in the vertebrate retina. I also gave a five minute lightning talk on the evolutionary origin of the tetrapod double cone.

Gordon Research Conference, Lucca Italy (2024). I presented a poster on amacrine cell evolution. I met many cool researchers working on visual system development and got to enjoy an italian sandwich in Florence! I had a great time hanging out with my lab mates in Italy: Matthew Po, Josh Hahn, and Sal Butrus.

Berkeley Neuroscience Conference – Granlibakken Tahoe (2023). This was my first poster presentation, and I received a lot of great feedback on my project. I also had a great time hanging out with the Berkeley Neuroscience community!