It’s been a busy, but at the same time really exciting, few months for this acute brain slice electrophysiologist. Presenting a poster, which was featured in the Imagining Science blog, at a huge international conference (Society for Neuroscience 2013) last November reminded me that there’s life beyond the four walls of the E-Phys. lab. It was great in the sense that I felt like people (who were not my supervisors or colleagues) really wanted to know about my research – a feeling I’ve never had before.

Not long after the end of the festive holiday, just as the fuzzy warm glow from SfN had started to wear off, I gave a 10 minute oral presentation at the Pharmacy Postgraduate Research Showcase 2014. Even though I presented the same piece of research that was on my SfN poster, it was still quite a challenge to fit it all into a coherent 10 minute talk. However, I was pleasantly surprised by a number of things that day. Firstly, half way through the presentation I started to enjoy myself – it’s not every day that you get to talk about your research to a captive audience of 50+ scientists. Secondly, at the end the presentation I was asked a lot of very good questions, which allowed me to expand on some of the points I had to briefly gloss over due to time constraints. Finally, I won the prize for the best 2nd year PhD student talk!

With this recent boost in confidence I’ve now decided to take part in Reading Science Week’s Science Slam where I hope to introduce to people the very interesting findings from my patch clamp experiments.

Image by Thomas Hill