The Second Part of AAS 227th Meeting in Florida: Poster!

While the first post for AAS meeting is about my experience at the conference in general, the second post will be dedicated mostly on my first experience in a poster presentation.

During mid-October, my advisor and I decided that I should give a poster presentation on my current research project at AAS as a good way to introduce my project to the community in order to gather feedbacks about it. I spent around two weeks in December working with the poster from creating a template for the poster, generating the information, figures and diagram, and finalizing the poster. It was a rewarding experience as you got to see the physical poster at the end. We decided to use a fabric poster for easy packing and traveling which made an awesome poster.

My first poster for the AAS Meeting

Some people argue that a poster presentation is more useful than oral presentation as the speakers have more time to interact, answer questions, and clarify with the audience during the poster session. However, one of the downsides for poster presentation is the time spent at the poster. In order for a poster presentation to be as effective as possible, you have to spend most of the day at the poster and ready to present your results to anyone who might stop by. But, this also implies that you will not have any time that day to participate in some other events. Specifically, I was really excited to participate in the Hack Day at the conference, but I could attend as I had to present my poster. I did not say that I would rather attend the Hack Day than presenting my poster. I simply said that by doing so, I limited myself to fewer things that I could potentially do that day.

Therefore, it is not difficult to see that the most interesting part in presenting the poster is, in fact, people that I got to meet during the meeting. I got a chance to talk to many people who are working on galaxy clusters and x-ray observation. The notable ones are:
- Mark Brodwin (UMKC): he is my advisor's collaborator and find one of the most massive galaxy cluster in the high redshift region.
- Thomas Conner (Michigan State): he is working on crowded field photometry in the CLASH clusters by using red-sequencing.
- Allison Noble (UToronto): she is working on z=0.2 galaxy cluster and probing dust temperature and star formation rate as a function of environment and accretion history. (She will be joining us at MIT for a postdoc in 2016).
- Yuanyuan Su (CfA): she is working on deep Chandra observation of NGC-1404 to constraint on the transport processes in the intra-cluster medium.
- Wenli Mo (UFlorida): she is working on Massive Distant Clusters of WISE Survey (MaDCoWS), and trying to find active galactic nuclei in galaxy clusters.

There are many things that I can do better during the poster session from answering better for each question and actually remember people's name who came to the poster. But in general, it was a great experience and definitely a good start for my research in X-ray and galaxy clusters.

Me with a poster at AAS227th meeting in Florida