Our 2023 annual retreat is from October 20-22 at the Stanford Sierra Conference Center, Fallen Leaf Lake, Tahoe. Stay tuned for details!
2022 Annual Retreat
Our annual retreat was held October 14-16, 2022, at the Stanford Sierra Conference Center, Fallen Leaf Lake, Tahoe. Dr. Miki Yamamoto, Head of Regulatory Affairs at ArriVent Biopharma gave the keynote talk on Friday. The talk included a discussion of the speaker’s graduate experience, how she got into regulatory affairs, various projects she has worked on, and her experience with advancing in the career ladder.
The retreat was attended by 25 Program Trainees, 35 first-year graduate students, including five students from the NIH-funded IMSD Program, 6 undergraduate students from the NIH-funded MARC program, 5 students from the NIH-funded PREP Program, as well as graduate students and postdocs from trainer laboratories. 18 currently funded trainees gave oral presentations at the retreat. We included a real-time Survey Monkey based evaluation link in the scientific program to enable participants to provide anonymous feedback on each of the Trainee talks, and that was provided to trainees. Trainees in their fourth year of graduate school presented posters. To better engage first-year graduate students attending the retreat and promote cohort building, we created a special poster session for our 4th year trainees and assigned posters to groups of first-year students so they could interact with trainees and also serve as poster judges. First-year students were provided a scoring criteria and we requested them to score each poster between 1 and 5 (1 represents a great poster and presentation; 3 is an average poster that, while enjoyable and instructive, could be improved; 5 is a poster that needs significant improvement on both the poster itself and the presentation). First-year graduate students participated enthusiastically in this activity, provided their scores, and the winner of the poster session was announced at the conclusion of the retreat.
Other activities at the retreat included a talk by Program Co-Director Dr. Elva Diaz on the topic of wellness and resilience where she discussed tools for becoming a successful professional and for enhancing your wellbeing and work environment. There was also a poster session which provided an opportunity for graduate students in trainer’s laboratories, and undergraduate MARC students to present posters. During Saturday’s luncheon, we organized topic tables where faculty talked to students about navigating early, middle, and late stages of graduate school. Overall, the retreat provided an opportunity for all attendees to participate and engage in stimulating scientific sessions.