I wanted to take a moment and post an interesting workshop being hosted by AAAS tonight at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting: Careers Away from the Bench. It will be held from 6:30pm – 8pm at the San Diego Convention Centre, room 4.

The workshop will address career options for PhDs outside of academia or non-academic research. They promise to discuss how to identify opportunities, and how to develop the skills that will help launch a successful career away from (bench) research.

I’d say it is absolutely worth a visit, even if you do want to pursue academia. You never know where a career might take you and being informed of the options will prove valuable at some point in your life.

If you can’t attend, AAAS has a wealth of information available on their outreach website.

The Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting is being held in Chicago this year, and yesterday it kicked off with over 29.000 attendees. Most likely, the total number of neuroscientists working on all areas of the brain will climb to over 30.000 over the next few days.

The conference kicked off with a wonderful, and rather unexpected dialogue between Neuroscience and Society: “Magic, the Brain, and the Mind”. Real magicians took the stage, and wowed the audience with their extraordinary ability to fool our minds and divert our attention. Apollo Robbins, and Eric Mead took the stage, and our attention, away from some of the excellent “hard science” being discussed at this meeting as well.

An entertaining start for sure, and got us focused on the fact that there is still a lot about the brain, consciousness, and awareness, that we need to explore.

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