Participant Testimonials
I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed the BIRS workshop. Thanks to that meeting I have already initiated two new collaborations and I have learned an enormous amount about both the models currently used for bacterial diseases and also about the potential similarities with models for cancer treatment and drug resistance in cancer. I also had the opportunity to work with one of my collaborators and we realized some new properties of our mathematical model which will contribute to a paper in the next few months. I particularly enjoyed the format of the meeting with long talks that allowed for a lot of interactions between the speaker and the audience as well as enough free time to work with specific colleagues and to enjoy the magnificent surroundings. I think that the fact that we were a relatively small group also helped a lot with making the meeting very interactive: I had productive discussions with almost all the participants although some of them work in fields that are very different than mine. Last but not least, I was very impressed that the gender balance in the meeting was very good, which in my experience is rarely the case. The facilities were excellent and the provision of small rooms with boards for discussion was particularly useful. I also enjoyed the swimming pool! In summary, this was the best meeting I have attended in a number of years.
Centre for Synthetic and Systems biology, University of Edinburgh
The workshop introduced me to a set of new ideas that I have not been exposed to before. I have made 3-4 new contacts that I plan to use in the future and initiate collaborations with at least some of them. It was a very useful conference and a great venue for doing mathematics.
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Montana State University
The BIRS conference was a wonderful experience. I found it extremely useful to hear about work slightly peripheral to my own area of research, especially from senior and esteemed mathematicians. I work in cancer biology, but a number of mathematical techniques and models being used in bacterials systems are directly applicable to my project-- this was wonderful to discover. This has opened up a number of potential directions I plan to pursue, and I have also found some wonderful collaborators. The group was extremely accomplished and I benefitted not just from listening to formal talks, but from the questions I received about my own work. Meals and breaks provided wonderful opportunities for discussion, and the small group size really encouraged this. Big thanks to the organizers and to BIRS for providing such a wonderful scientific program!
The workshop was useful to me in that I may start a collaboration with one of the participants, and in addition met a number of people whose work I knew of but didn't know personally. In addition there were a number of very good talks.
