Conference Summary
International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) 16th Annual Meeting
May 3-9, 2008,  Toronto, Canada

Christian Graff
PhD Candidate
Applied Mathematics GIDP

Thanks in part to the Herbert E. Carter Travel Award program, I was recently able to attend the 16th meeting of the ISMRM.  The ISMRM conference is the most important and most widely attended meeting in the magnetic resonance imaging community.  This year there were approximately 6000 attendees and more than 3000 talks and poster presentations were given.  The ISMRM conference is very interdisciplinary in nature, with a broad mixture of medical doctors, physicists, engineers, mathematicians and biologists coming together and sharing ideas.

The first two days of the conference were dedicated to day-long educational seminars in which leaders in the field presented background material and broad summaries of research areas.  I was able to attend sessions on MR physics and image reconstruction which were a very helpful review of some of the things I have learned over the past few years.

In the remaining five days there were a series of poster sessions, oral presentations, corporate symposia and keynote talks.  I presented some of my work on estimation of MR parameters useful for cancer detection on May 6 and some results in human image simulation on May 7.  Both presentations were a success and the comments I received will enable me to improve on my results.

Throughout the meeting I tried to go to as many talks as possible and I think I came away with a good feeling for what other research groups have accomplished in the year since the previous ISMRM meeting.  I had many fruitful discussions with both new and old acquaintances, and was able to get caught up on the research being carried out by a number of U of A alumni who have now moved into post-doctoral positions.

Attending conferences is one of the most important parts of a graduate student's career and I'm very glad that the Herbert E. Carter Travel Award program exists to help students like me who are working in interdisciplinary fields.  It is very encouraging to attend a conference where researchers from very different backgrounds can meet and discuss common goals.  For that I would like to thank the Herbert E. Carter Travel Award committee for their generous funding.