Here comes Tiger ~: May 2008

Day 0

I got a free lunch in Paris…well, more accurately, Paris international airport. The meal consists of a starter (2 fried eggs), a small disk of the main course (noodle and a piece of ham), a soft drink (orange juice), plus a dessert (a huge chocolate ice cream). Ice cream really works! It calms me down a bit and absolutely no complaint any more.

And, of course, this free lunch voucher is not coming from nothing. Well, I bet that it won’t surprise you any longer if I tell you it’s due to flight delay in the PHL airport. PHL was ranked top 12 most terrible airport (out of 40) in the delay/luggage loss/overbooking list in 2007. (I thought it is not fair…because PHL should deserve higher ranking, at least top 5!!)

You might have heard thousands of reasons for the flight delays. Here is one I have experienced on my Day 0. Not because of weather, nor busy scheduling, but simply a human error, or, I should say, computer error?? The counts of passengers from two computer systems appear to differ from each other: ±1. The crews spent 1 hour to figure out what had happened. Well, one passenger’s name was shown twice with different last names in one computer system.

And, the consequence is: 30 people missed their connection flights to Budapest and so did some other passengers. It turn out I got extra 6 hours in the Paris international airport, listening to a lot of people speaking fluent……French, I guess.

Finally, I arrived at the Stadion Hotel before 8:00pm (local time).

From the window...

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Day 1

Tutorial sections in the morning by Drs. Zbigniew Darzynkiewicz and Frank Traganos

Frontier/keynote sections - Cytometry in the Age of Systems Biology
Frontier speakers: Drs. Peter So(my former advisor); David Weitz Keynote speaker of this meeting: Dr. D.Lansing Taylor, founder, Present and CEO of Cellumen, Inc

The back of Dr. J Paul Robinson, president of ISAC, my former advisor in PUCL.

Opening reception

Dr. Peter So

Dr. Lansing Taylor

Dr. J Paul Robinson

Drs. James Leary and J Paul Robinson, my thesis committee in Purdue. They got to turn around to face the light for this picture.

Dr. Zbigniew Darzynkiewicz Dr. Darzynkiewicz is a superstar for me on the fields of image cytometry, apoptosis, cell cycle, and DNA damage. He said that he remembers me because my name is Tiger...

Dr. Howard Shapiro with others. Howard has been the authority in flow cytometry for a long time.

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President's Reception, InterContinental Hotel Budapest

On the way to the reception...

Hungarian Parliament. During the night, it should look like this.

Three US tourists on the street. They were my classmates in Purdue University. All three lost their luggages yesterday from Chicago airport to Paris. I feel more fortunate because I only lost 6 hours, not the luggages. I decided to go with them without changing my clothes.

River Danube

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Drs. J. Paul Robinson, Lansing Taylor, and Robert Murphy (in the back)

Dr. Alan Waggoner

Dr. Attila Tarnok, editor_in_chief of Cytometry A

Boilermakers!

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Day 2

Dr. Gustavo Kunde Rohde, Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Jeff Price, whose group in San Diego Center for Chemical Genomiccs has goal to achieve >100,000 wells/day HCS.

Dr. Bruce Edwards, whose lab works on HTS flow cytometer.

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Day 3

A lot of food again...

Howard Shapiro and his toy.

"Representatives" from BioPharmaceuticals: Marie A Iannone (GSK, RTP) and some other folks.

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Day 4

Ann Hoffman and Geoffrey Osborne: High throughput, high content analysis parallel section

Folks from PerkinElmer, Germany. They thought ISAC is not focus on imaging but that is not true. More than half of topics were strong high-content imaging related. Beacuase cytometry is not necessary flow.

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Day 5

Boilermarkers

Dr. Ann F. Hoffman told me not to present this picture in the trip report so I hope she did not mind I put here...:-)

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Closing reception and banquet

Paul Todd and his academic grandchildren.

Two ISAC presidents, Drs. J. Paul Robinson and Robert Murphy

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No matter who presidents are, cytometry society is a big family of a lot of professional...DANCERS! Most of time, they were just dancing (for 2 and half hours). Among dozens of pictures taken, I swear, those are the best ones: