Last Day in Italy

Today I awoke knowing that it would be my last full day in Italy. It has truly been a beautiful place and wonderful time.

Todays talks had two keynotes: one from Georgia Institute of Tehnology and the other from Brookhaven National Laboratory. I mention that because it is very impressive for Kate and Denis to be able to bring researchers, faculty, students and industry from East Coast, West Coast and around the globe to this conference to collaborate and exchange ideas.

Just to paint a picture: you walk into the room and evryone has their laptops open and your thinking to yourself, is anyone even listening or looking at the presentation and then at the end, when the session chair ask "Are there any questions", eight hands go up and they refer to slide 5, graph 1.

The talks were all day today, from 8:30 a.m. until 8 p.m. but the night ended with a mountainside feast.

If you all remember from an earlier post, the hotel is located on top of a mountain valley. Our dinner was outside over looking the city. We all mingled, shared stories and had a wonderful 5 course meal, our last dinner of the conference.

After dinner, Kate was presented with a gift for such a wonderful conference. The comment was made from the Engineering Conference International (ECI) coordinators, that they rarely see attendees stay the whole conference and interact as they did this conference. They were surprised to see it. ECI conference take about 2 years to fully plan and Kate and Denis had been palnning this one for about that time. I wasn`t surprised to see the interactionor collaborations that were fostered during this conference because that is what Kate and Denis strive for in the work they do. I`ve had the pleasure of working with both of them for years now and have seen them bridge many gaps.

This conference gave me the opportunity to meet and speak with some very interesting people while here. All conversations of course were not about science, engineering or medicine. Engineers and scientist have lives outside of their work :)

In the end, we celebrated with dancing and karoke.

So, I`ll end this blog with a question. What songs do you think were sung, when you bring together a group of about 10 different nationalities for karoke?