Trento, March 7th-8th

Finally I have some time to give an insight of what happened Tuesday and Friday, when I left for Trento to attend to the ITC-irst’s meeting called “Biobanks for functional genomics”. The trip was mostly uneventful, though we had to wait a lot once we arrived at the ITC-irst because we were way earlier than expected. I spent time talking to some people there, they work in an interesting field: applying computational methods to microarray expression data. I was the only one with a biological background there, the rest had degrees in mathemathics or physics.

The conference started with a very interesting talk by Chris Stoeckert from the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the MGED society.  He is a funny and extremely smart person and I even managed to exchange opinions with him.

After the talks we headed out to the hotel Villa Madruzzo where we had a very pleasant dinner (not to mention it was free!). We finished around midnight, I went to sleep but at 2 in the morning the fire alarm sounded. There was no fire, just the alarm, for some odd reason. The same happened at 7.

After a nice breakfast, the 8-hour-long talk session started. Some were really too difficult for me, others were easier but overall it was an interesting session. Once we were done, someone brought us to the station, and then I got my train home.

Tiring experience, but definitely interesting.