Spectrum Launch: The Hidden Costs of Conference Travel | Spectrum

Example by Lauren Boglio

Parsa Taheri, a first-year student at the University of Houston in Texas, learned that academia’s payback culture doesn’t work for many early career researchers.

Taheri paid more than $1,000 out of pocket to attend the 2023 Pediatric Research Society conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. Fortunately, she received a travel award from her university to cover some of the money, but the money was not available until she returned from her trip and submitted the conference registration, flight and hotel receipts. So in the meantime, those expenses — significant for someone on a graduate student salary — sat on her credit card for months, temporarily knocking her credit score, she says.

When a graduate student receives financial aid that covers conference-related expenses, they are still required to pay in advance after the trip. Graduate students “are just expected to have that money” or the ability to use credit, Taheri says. “So it’s going to be a big equity issue.”

Lillian Brady, a postdoctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, says that researchers who can’t afford to attend a conference “may be in a bit of trouble; Research based on research. “An academic science class, or research in general, is about communicating your science and being able to meet people in your field.”

Many travel awards don’t cover the full cost of conference attendance, especially when travel costs increase with inflation, Brady says. She says she wants to apply for several at once, hoping to get at least one.

Conference organizers often offer travel awards, as do scientific societies and the researcher’s home institution. And applicants don’t always have to be members of a conference organization or community to apply, Taheri says — something she’d like you to know ahead of time. It also helps to choose which conferences to attend rather than attending in person. Taheri says she now plans to attend one big meeting a year and look for more regional conferences where she can get her face on a smaller budget.

But the system needs to change, she says. If universities are to continue to make returns, “they should at least happen quickly.”

Book of the Month:

“Does God play dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos, by Ian Stewart – so he said he “read” the non-fiction book that explores the mathematics of chaos theory.

WorksTrainings And money.

• Current or recently graduated PhD students researching childhood disabilities may apply for the Holland Bloorview 2023 Pursuit Award. Applications are open until July 18.
• Mirella Dapreto and Shulamite Green at the University of California, Los Angeles are hiring a staff research associate to coordinate participant recruitment and data collection and to assist with grants and publications for their autism neuroimaging studies.
• Alessandro Gozzi, a senior researcher at the Istituto Italiano di Technologie in Rovereto, Italy, is seeking a Ph.D. student to study brain connectivity mechanisms in the mammalian brain.
• Western University in London, Ontario, Canada has three open positions in the Advanced Neural Circuits group.
• Eric Levine, a professor of neuroscience at Connecticut Medical School in Farmington, is hiring a postdoctoral researcher focused on synaptic modulation in the hippocampus and cortex.

Recommended Resources:

• Hailey Hu of Utrecht University in the Netherlands grew up poor and often felt like an outsider in academia, but being open about her background helped her connect with her colleagues, she writes. Science.
• Autistic people considering a career in academia should be sure to find supportive colleagues, remember their safety and “proceed cautiously but with passion,” according to a study by Current Autistic Scholars published last month. Autism.
• David Rubenson, director of NobadSlide, a science communication firm in Los Angeles, California, helps start with a simple narrative when writing a new talk in a career column. Nature. “The audience will remember certain slides the day after your talk… Think of two or three main ideas that you hope they will remember.”
• Gundula Bosch, program director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, told Society for Neuroscience Online that researchers can make a difference in their communities by publishing opinion pieces and using social media effectively.
• An article in Trends in PHPharmacological Sciences Provides tips for making letters of recommendation fair to scientists, especially from underrepresented groups.
• Danielle Wheaton, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington in Seattle, writes about her challenges as a researcher and new parent in an article for the Institute for Mathematical Statistics. “[G]The tenure is not the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It is also not very rewarding. After all, my writing never likes me. But, I never needed to help them raise them.

Any suggestions on how to make this newsletter as useful as possible or what topic we should cover next? Send them [email protected].

Cite this article: https://doi.org/10.53053/ADMU7670