June 30 - July 1st Hawaii Ecosystem Conference

The Hawaii Ecosystem meeting, which is often called the "Vitousek" meeting (Peter Vitousek lurks here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/Vitousek/), was a diverse collection of talks from students, professors, and government agencies. It was wonderful to be included in this conference. I especially enjoyed the 5 minute talk by Tad Fukami (http://www.stanford.edu/~fukamit/)on Kipuka community ecology work.

I had the pleasure of presenting a 5 minute oral presentation at this meeting. I was told by many people that I did a great job. I did a whirlwind presentation on my MSc. work, and made time to squeeze in a "do you need a research or Ph. D student" advertisement at the end; I am on the next leg of my journey through academia...starting to think about future research projects and questions. See the talk below in the meeting agenda:



The meeting also had break out groups to address projects. In addition to briefly joining a community ecology session, I spent time talking with others about science outreach. The picture below is of students and professionals talking about communicating science to non-scientists and working with multiple stake holders to address concerns such as environmental conservation.