Hamburg, Germany

Fireworks outside my hotel room in Hamburg

On Memorial Day, I flew to Hamburg, Germany to give a talk at a conference there. The University of Hamburg is starting up their own nanoscience institute (abbreviated as INCH, which defies their metric and scaling conventions), and the big daddy of European nanoscience had asked my graduate advisor to come give a talk. My advisor couldn’t make it, so I got to go pretend to be him in Germany.

I was a little nervous giving my talk, since all the other talks were by luminaries in nanoscience, but everything went smoothly and a lot of people told me I was “a good replacement.” I got to meet a lot of the big professors in the field as well as grad students and postdocs who worked at Hamburg. I also ran into some people I knew previously from my graduate research group and also some acquaintances from previous conferences. I got wined and dined as an “invited speaker” and went out on the town with various professors and grad students in gorgeous Hamburg. It was a tiring 3 days of traveling, preparing for my talk, and attending round-the-clock seminars, but it was well worth the trip to Europe.