My first conference talks, two very different experiences

I flew all the way out to California last week to present work at the COSPAR (Committee of Outer Space Research) conference in Pasadena. 

I had been accepted to give two talks which was both pretty exciting and terrifying as I had somehow avoided ever giving a talk at a conference until now. Poster presentations, which I have done many of, are way more chilled (in my experience). You stand by your poster for a few hours and if anyone is interested they come and find you for a one-on-one chat, and there’s usually free beer to help the science flow. A talk on the other hand is (for me) a much more stressful proposition. Standing up in front of your peers, which may include eminent scientists who may ask horrifically complicated questions at the end, or may even just stand up and denounce your work to the whole audience (this dick-move is unfortunately quite a common occurrence). As such, I was quite nervous about the whole thing.

Both of my talks were about very different subjects. One for a project that is only a minor part of my job and I am in no way an expert on the subject matter – I was just the compiler of a large group’s work; the other on my latest research, which I’m pretty psyched to tell people about. So I felt somewhat worried about screwing up the first and not doing justice to the work of actual experts, but pretty good and excited about the latter.

What went down, however, was the complete opposite of my expectations.

In first talk, which was the one I was panicking about, went surprisingly well. I was presenting the chapter we have been writing for the Planetary Protection of the Outer Solar System (PPOSS) project. This is a report on how we can improve future organic contamination control for missions to the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

I was basically arguing that organic molecules (from plastics, oils, grease, etc.) on spaceflight hardware pose as great a threat to our attempts to detect life in the outer solar system as microbial hitchhikers (the current main target for planetary protection efforts). This is because, if we have a ‘dirty’ instrument we may only detect the ‘dirt’. In a normal environment this is often not such an issue as we can usually recognise contaminants. However, we do not understand much about the environments of the icy moons, especially the radiation levels, and how that will affect the contamination molecules, the molecules which could be evidence of extra-terrestrial life (what we call ‘biomarkers’), and any other non-biological organic molecules that are present on the surface. Basically we’re looking for a needle in a haystack, except we don’t know what the needle is made out of, nor what the haystack is made out of, if we don’t have a clean instrument we’ll never figure this out.

Titan, one of the Icy Moons of Saturn has a very complicated organic chemistry. To have any chance of understanding it we need to not contaminate our analyses with organic molecules from Earth as they may be greatly altered by the complex radiation environment and unrecognizable for what they are by the time they get there (image credit: NASA)

This becomes a planetary protection issue as if we detect our own contamination and mistake it for evidence of extra-terrestrial life everybody will get really excited and future missions will waste a lot of time and money trying to find out more about these imaginary aliens. Conversely, the contamination levels could be so high that they mask a real life signal – in this scenario we would lose our interest in looking for life on the moon, maybe never checking again and instead only sending ‘dirty’ non-life detection missions to look at other aspects of the moon. This could permanently contaminate the moon and destroy any chances of detecting that life there in the future. Both of these scenarios are pretty bad for planetary protection whose main goal is to avoid jeopardizing the search for extra-terrestrial life.

Despite the fact that I was delivering this talk first thing in the morning, telling a room packed full of real planetary protection experts (I’m just a confused geologist remember) how to do their job it went down pretty well. It triggered questions and discussion on whether organic contamination control is a planetary protection issue, exactly what we were trying to achieve.

Me doing science (credit ESF-Science Connect)

After the success of the first talk I was feeling pretty confident for my second where I was going to be presenting what I actually know about – my own research on the interactions between organic matter and minerals on Mars. This was mid-afternoon on the Thursday, what you’d expect to be the perfect slot: not too early or late so people haven’t woken up or have shut down, not right at the start or end of the week so people haven’t arrived yet or already left and not just before or just after lunch so that people aren’t too hungry or in their post-lunch daze.

In this talk I was presenting the findings in our latest paper, this will shortly be available open access but is currently behind a paywall here. I talked about how we’d calculated the minimum about of organic matter there would need to be in a Martian sample for a rover to be able to detect it despite the presence of problematic minerals (using current techniques). I then showed how this worked with samples from the closest environment we have to Mars on Earth, the Atacama Desert, and then applied this new knowledge to explain why organic matter has suddenly been found on Mars after 40 years of trying.

Nobody cared.

The end of my talk and the customary ‘I’d be happy to answer any questions’ was met with glazed expressions and silence. I half expected a tumbleweed to blow down the central aisle of the conference hall. Normally in these situations the chair of the session will have a question prepared, but even they were unable to hide their disinterest.

As an early career researcher, giving my second ever conference talk, on something I spent months working on, this was pretty crushing. I could only scurry back to my seat and, somewhat shell-shocked, watch the rest of the afternoon’s session.

What had I done wrong, it had all seemed to go smoothly from my end?

As the rest of the session unfolded it all became clear. It was not that I had delivered bad science, I had delivered the wrong science for the crowd’s interest. While I am primarily a lab rat, doing experiments to try to understand the results coming back from the Mars rovers, everybody else in the session worked on the satellites orbiting Mars. They were all interested in atmospheric gas measurements or photographs of surface landforms which is what all the other talks were about. This was, for once, not my fault. I should never have been given a talk in this session. While it was titled, ‘Mars Science Results’ and so should have been suitable, because of the dominance of orbital data it was not a diverse enough audience. This was on the session organisers.

Despite this realisation this pretty much ruined the rest of the conference for me, it was just too much of a downer after the way I’d built it all up in my head beforehand – I am NOT a confident public speaker in the slightest so had really had to psyche myself up.

This dependence on the right audience being present seems to be the major crucial thing to get something good out of a conference presentation of any sort. I’ve also had this with poster sessions in the past. I stood around for hours with no one interested enough to come up for a chat next to a poster at the European Geophysical Union conference a few years ago. I was presenting some my PhD research on high resolution palaeoclimate reconstruction based on the chemistry of coral skeletons. Everybody else in the session was doing things with water or plant chemistry – but we were all using ‘isotopes for novel environmental studies’ or whatever the title of the session was. Dead sessions like this are excruciating, you’re almost praying for the crazy ‘scientist’ who’s had a few too many at the free bar to come up and discuss his latest theory with you – there’s often one. Other poster sessions I’ve had great discussions which have led to ideas to improve the work I’m presenting or have created ideas for new projects. Although sometimes I just make a tit of myself, while intimidated and slightly star struck, in front of the top scientists in my field (although as long as they leave with a copy of my latest paper its all good…right?).

The issue seems to be that you can’t really gauge what it’s going to be like when you submit your abstract – the session titles and descriptions are always so vague. I guess if this happens you just have to shrug it off and just take it as a good practice run for the next time you have a more interested crowd. It’s not put me off anyway, now I really need to pull my finger out and write that AGU abstract, hopefully the crowd there will be better…