Notes in seminar—iMeta conference 2025
Seminar information
Location: HUBCM, Wuhan, Hubei, China
Time duration: 22 Aug 2025 - 25 Aug 2025
Pamphlet: 🗃️ iMeta Conference
Thoughts
Notes link (in personal Notion - private)
As no one in our laboratory shares a similar research direction to mine, I have been suffering from a lack of intellectual companionship for quite some time. Finally, I managed to attend the iMeta conference that was genuinely relevant to my research project, despite my supervisor’s rather lukewarm support.
For me, the most significant challenge with my current research project is the absence of adequate professional guidance. My supervisor is a researcher specialising in transcriptional regulation. Consequently, when venturing into microbiology, he simply applies conventional methods from transcriptional regulation to microbiome studies. This approach is not always sensible. I frequently encounter important results in some articles but haven’t the foggiest idea how to learn from or reproduce them. Often, exploring alone leads to a situation where one lacks fundamental knowledge of the microbiome and ends up going round the houses. I cannot see a way forward, which is why this conference was absolutely crucial for me. I was keen to learn from this gathering some of the basic principles in microbiome research that members of professional research groups would grasp from the outset. It sounds rather disheartening, but that’s precisely my predicament.
Through understanding some relavant research topics, I had this discovery that was both fortunate and unfortunate: I had been working on a project for a year or two, and the original premise was completely wrong regarding a crucial intermediate step. This meant I had to begin from scratch. However, it was better than never discovering the problem at all. Another surprising revelation was that a problem I had discussed with a professor exploring intra-tumour microbiome during the summer school which had remained unresolved, found its potential solution through inspiration from a lecture at this very conference.
After learning about the various research being conducted by fellow participants, I initially lost all enthusiasm for delivering the oral presentation I had been selected to give. However, I reasoned that perhaps through the oral presentation, I might receive some valuable suggestions from professional academics and colleagues. I steeled myself, completed the slides, and delivered my speech on the designated day. Remarkably, my presentation received great feedback and earned me the First Prize for graduate student presentations. Nevertheless, I recognise this wasn’t because I had conducted outstanding research, but simply because my logic was clearer than others’. I was particularly honoured that several students specialising in microbiome added me on WeChat following my presentation. At last, I no longer feel as though I’m conducting research in complete isolation. Although I’m rather poor at socialising, I do hope to have opportunities to learn from them in future.
There was a delightful surprise beyond the scientific research. I revisited a bar I had frequented several times five years ago. The bartender was exceptionally welcoming throughout all three evenings I spent at the bar. Apart from the initial whisky sour, I scarcely ordered any drinks myself thereafter. I simply drank whatever the bartender prepared for me. After more than a dozen cocktails, not a single one was disagreeable. Not only did the bartender offer me numerous complimentary shots, but simply because I mentioned shisha in passing, he prepared me a bottle of shisha gratis for free, which could cost around 300 yuan. As glasses were raised and emptied, it seemed as though all extraneous emotions were swept away. All that remained was the immersive experience of watching cocktail preparation and the artistic sensation it evoked. Such a marvellous drinking experience I have never encountered in Shanghai, despite it being a city with a thriving cocktail culture.
The day I returned to Shanghai, I found myself in rather low spirits. Perhaps it’s due to the overwhelming amount of unfinished work and the necessity of redoing previous projects. Perhaps it’s also because my days at Fudan have become increasingly constrained and rather depressing. However, at the very least, I learnt a great deal this time and genuinely engaged with research in this small field, which may provide me with the knowledge needed to progress in future. The most pressing matter now is to allow my emotions to settle naturally and gradually return to my daily scientific research work.