I am recently back from the 2013 Ecology and Evolution of Infections Disease Conference at Penn State University. This was quite possibly the best meeting I have ever attended, not even for the science (which was nonetheless impeccable), but for the culture. I place the blame for this awesome culture firmly on the shoulders of the leaders of this field and, in particular, the primary motivating force behind the recent emergence of this field, Penn State's Peter Hudson. Since I had attended the other EEID conference at UGA earlier this Spring (another great conference), I had no intention on attending the Penn State conference this year. Then, one day in late March, Nita Bharti asked me if I was going and mentioned, "You know it's Pete's 60th birthday, right?" Well that sealed it; I really had no choice. I simply had to go if for no other reason than to pay my due respect to this man I admire so greatly. Pete has the most relentless optimism about the future of science and a willingness to make things happen that I have ever encountered and, in this way, has provided me one of my primary role models as a university professor and mentor. He has played a role in developing so many of the brilliant people who make this field so exciting, it's amazing (just a sample that comes immediately to mind: Ottar Bjornstad, Matt Ferrari, Nita Bharti, Marcel Salathé, Isabella Cattadori, Jamie Lloyd-Smith, Shweta Bansal, Jess Metcalf...). Of course, even as I write this, I realize the joint influence of another major player in the field, Bryan Grenfell, formerly of Penn State but now at Princeton, becomes obvious. A great scientist in his own right, Pete is the master facilitator, providing the support (and institutional interference!) that allows young scholars to thrive. He is a talent-spotter extraordinaire.
The talks that made up the bulk of the scientific program were, for the most part, excellent. The average age of the speakers was about 30, maybe just a bit higher. When one attends an academic conference, one typically expects that the major addresses to the collected masses will be by geezers, er, senior scholars in the field. There was a clear play at inversion of the standard model here though. Speakers were clearly chosen because of their trajectories, not their past achievements. That's pretty great. When I went up for tenure at Stanford, I was told that Stanford does not really care about what you have done; it cares about what you will do. Of course, the best information that the university has about your future work is the work you have already done. This conference embodied this spirit by placing the future (and, in many cases, current) leaders of the field in the key speaking roles while some of the biggest names in ecology, population biology, and epidemiology sat happily in the audience (e.g., joining Hudson and Grenfell were Andy Dobson, Andrew Read, Mick Crawley, Charles Godfray, Mike Boots, Mercedes Pascual, Les Real, Matt Thomas, ...)
The tone set by these great mentors carries through to the whole culture of the conference, where senior people attended the poster sessions, sat with students at lunches and dinners, and schmoozed at the plentiful open-bar mixers. For example, on the first full day of the conference, there was an afternoon poster session that started at 4:30 (we had been in back-to-back sessions since 8:30). This session was preceded by an hour-long poster-teaser session in which grad students and post-docs got up and presented 60-second (and, as Andrew Read noted, not one nanosecond more) teasers of their posters. Bear in mind, this session was entirely comprised of students and post-docs. It was striking that essentially every seat in the house was occupied and all the major players were present. The teasers were great – many were very funny, including a haiku apparently written by a triatomine bug and translated to us by Princeton EEB student Jennifer Peterson.
After the teasers, the conference went en masse to the fancy new Millenium Science Complex (it turns out that Pete Hudson has physical capital projects in addition to human capital ones!). There, participants milled about the 150 posters. After spending quite a bit of time doing this – and dutifully getting pictures of all my lab with their posters – I thought to check the time and realized it was nearly 6:30. The poster session had been going for two hours and nearly everyone was still there, including all the luminaries. It helped that there was free beer. I tweeted my amazement at this realization:
Poster session at 6:15 pm. Almost everyone still here (all silverbacks present). Only at #EEID13 pic.twitter.com/mUKKLQIbBG
— Jamie Jones (@juemos) May 21, 2013
That is, in fact, Princeton's Bryan Grenfell moving fast in the middle of the picture, apparently making a bee-line for Michigan's Aaron King. Andrew Read is in the far background, talking to a poster-presenter (he has that posture).
Scientific highlights for me included Caroline Buckee's talk about measuring mobility in the context of malaria transmission in Kenya and Derek Cummings's talk on the Fluscape Project to measure spatial heterogeneity in influenza transmission in China. I am a long-time fan of this project and it's nice to see the great work that has come out of it. These talks were right in my wheelhouse of interest, but there were plenty other cool ones including Britt Koskella's talk on the dynamics of bacteria and phage on tree leaves.
Stanford was exceedingly well represented at this conference. My lab had no fewer than five posters. Ashley Hazel presented on her work with Carl Simon on modeling gonorrhea transmission dynamics in Kaokoland, Namibia. Whitney Bagge presented her work on remote-sensing of rodent-borne disease in Kenya. Alejandro Feged presented work on the transmission dynamics of malaria in the Colombian Amazon among the indigenous Nukak people. Laura Bloomfield presented her remote sensing and spatial analysis work from our project on the spillover of primate retroviruses in Western Uganda. I closed things out with a minimalist poster on simple graphical models for multiple attractors in vector-borne disease dynamics in multi-host ecologies. In addition to my lab group, Giulio De Leo (with whom I have been running a weekly disease ecology workshop at Woods since winter quarter) was there, helping to bridge all sorts of structural holes in our collective collaboration graphs.
The other thing that comes out of these meetings, especially more intimate ones like EEID, is some actual work on collaborative projects. I managed to find some time to sit down and discuss plans with collaborators as well as do some shameless recruitment for my planned re-submission of the Stanford Biodemography Workshops. I'm really excited about some of these collaborations, including one that brings together my two major areas of interest: biodemography and life history theory and infectious disease ecology.
Oh, and I'm convinced that there must be an interpretive dance component to the Ph.D. exam in the Grenfell lab. This is certainly the most parsimonious explanation for much of what I saw Wednesday night.