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Four Days in Salt Lake City

Omer Ashmaig is a sophomore majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He is an Undergraduate Research Associate in the Gross Translational Biomedical Neuroengineering Lab and a Peer Mentor in the Research Partners Program.


I recently had the opportunity to attend a scientific conference, COSYNE, with my graduate student mentor, Mark Connolly, and another undergraduate from my lab, Syed Ali Zaidi.




COSYNE is a computational and systems neuroscience conference. I had the pleasure of being awarded a travel grant to attend the conference through the conference organization itself. The travel grant covered the cost of the conference itself, flights, hotels, food, transportation, and any other expenses directly related to the conference. The program also matched me with a post-doc who served as my mentor during the conference. I spent four days in Salt Lake City, where I was able to listen to many amazing talks and ground-breaking research from around the globe, interact with many interesting poster presentations, and grow my professional network.





After those four days, I then headed off to a ski resort to attend a series of workshops. The workshops were an informal setting of collegial discussion and debate where many important research questions and topics were discussed.




In the end, I learned about the various sub-fields and topics of computational neuroscience, how to interact with scientists from around the globe and ask questions about their research, and made life-long friends! It was an experience and opportunity that I would do all over again!

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