I registered last minute for the Mammalian Synthetic Biology Workshop and it was awesome. It was really neat to see all the research everyone’s doing.

I got to chat with Ron and Mariola, from iGEM 2011. Definitely a blast from the past.

Ron said he still shows my animation occasionally. Haha, sweet.

Irving Weissman gave a really cool stem cell keynote.

Alex said Irv is like the godfather of stem cell research. Very impressive!

I unexpectedly ran into Pete! I haven’t seen him in like maybe 6 years!

It was great catching up!

Alex also gave a talk! I really enjoyed the talk, not only because I’d never heard Alex give a talk before, but also he had a clear and fun delivery style.

He thanked his wife, Amy, in the credits slide which I thought was super cute.

I think it’s super cool when couples are involved in each others’ fields. Amy probably provides some extraordinary research feedback just like how Harry gives me a lot of feedback for my conference talks.

Anyhoo, mSBW3 was great event. I saw some old friends, learned some neat stuffs, and in general had a good time.

One wish: I wish the the slides from talks are posted online somewhere. A great feature software conferences is that a lot of talks are recorded and the talks’ slides are posted online. This way, the conference can benefit a greater community.