APS March Meeting

I attended the APS March meeting in Baltimore this year. I didn’t know anyone there, and was the only member of our research group out there but I got the opportunity to see a lot of interesting talks and posters. I also checked out the job fair, but it didn’t have anything of any interest to me there unfortunately. This was the biggest conference I have ever been to, with about ten or so parallel talk sessions running most of the time. Contributed talks were only 10 minutes long, and invited talks were usually 35 minutes long. There were a very large range of talks, and as it was more general than previous conferences I had attended I was able to attend a few talks totally unrelated to my research but of interest to me. There were also a massive range of booths at the exhibition from a whole range of companies. It was interesting to see so many manufacturers, publishers and software companies displaying their latest and greatest products all in one place. The whole conference was on a larger scale than anything I have previously seen. Some of the talks I saw revealed other groups working on some of the aspects I do but in quite different ways. Not all of this work had turned up in my searches of the published literature so I have quite a few papers I would like to look up once I get back to the office. I also talked to an interesting person on one of the booths about ADS which isn’t just for astronomers. I have since used it and found it very useful for finding papers published in physics journals, and when combined with CAS it covers pretty much everything in my field.