After having our abstracts accepted Tom, Ellen and myself had the exciting opportunity to attend the American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring 2018 meeting entitled ‘The Nexus of Food, Energy & Water’ in New Orleans, Louisiana. The conference and expo provides a platform for academics and industry professionals working under the wide umbrella of chemistry to meet and present the most cutting edge research in their respective fields.

We arrived a few days before the conference which allowed us to explore the beautiful leafy suburbs of the Garden District. Coincidentally, our first weekend in New Orleans also fell on St. Patrick’s Day for which we were wildly underprepared. We vastly underestimated the unrivalled enthusiasm that American’s possess for the event and were astounded by the colossal floats and street parties that took place during the parades. After exploring the swamps, jazz clubs and cemeteries and sampling the local cuisine (of which there is plenty to try!), it was time to attend the conference.

ACS plays host to around 15,000 people and the scale of the meeting was like nothing we’d experienced before. The warehouse-like expo halls were filled with thousands of posters and stands, and talks were spread over multiple buildings throughout the city centre. Due to the hugely diverse nature of the meeting, it’s easy to find talks that are interesting and relevant to ones area of research and as a result we attended sessions on anything from actinide nanoclusters to contaminated sites. Throughout these sessions we were able to see excellent talks from academics whose work we’d been reading throughout our research careers and in some cases we were fortunate enough to meet and discuss both their and our own work. These invaluable experiences have provided us with greater insight into our areas of research, new ideas for our work moving forward, and also provided us with the exciting potential of collaborations in the future. As well as attending many talks throughout the meeting, exploring the vast expo hall, poster sessions and attending the social events were also key activities on the itinerary. One particularly impressive event was the Royal Society of Chemistry social that took place in the New Orleans aquarium with a backdrop of fish and sea turtles for the talks.

On the final day of the conference we gave our oral presentation in the session ‘Molecular Processes at Mineral-Water Interfaces: Linking Theory & Experiments’. In spite of our nerves, the presentations all went very well and garnered some interest from the audience and led to some interesting conversations with fellow researchers afterwards.

Overall, our trip to ACS Spring 2018 was an invaluable experience in which we gained priceless career-developing opportunities whilst also being fortunate enough to visit one of the most vivid and exciting cities in the USA.

By Luke Townsend