ENDO 2018 Student Reflections

As always when I attend conferences with students, I encourage them to go to as many talks as possible, to meet people, to participate fully in the event, and afterward to reflect on their experience. Maddie was at ENDO as a recipient of the summer research fellowship so she got to meet a lot of other young scientists. They had a very nice symposium with poster session, food, and networking on Sunday evening.

So without further ado, here are Maddie’s reflections on her time at ENDO:

Attending the Endocrine Society’s Annual Meeting in Chicago was a unique experience. As an international conference, it was quite large and had attendants from all over the world. The talks I attended were extremely technical and almost all of the talks were given by clinical physicians, which I found really surprising. At the other conferences I’ve attended as an undergraduate, the talks were predominantly given by faculty and tended to be more understandable to me, likely because I am a chemist first.
One of the strengths of the Endocrine Conference I thought was the opportunity to network with other scientists. I most enjoyed visiting various posters in the expo hall and just having the opportunity to chat with people about their research. My favorite poster I visited was presented by a physician from the Philippines who had done a post-doctoral research fellowship in the states at Columbia University. He was studying the effect of Metformin, an older drug, on endometrial cancer. I thought this was interesting because I had never heard of Metformin, but it is apparently a very common drug to treat diabetes, and because I had never met someone doing endometrial cancer research. Endometrial cancer is fairly uncommon, but is difficult to diagnose until its late stages. I was curious if Metformin and his research could also be applied to treat endometriosis, another disease of the endometrial tissue. He said he had actually pondered that a lot and was also curious if the research could be translated to endometriosis.

Here is Maddie with her fellow SRF attendees.