In late June 2019, prior to attending the APICAM conference in Melbourne, we hosted our MURI collaborators Tresa Pollock (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Pete Collins (Iowa State University) in Sydney. A two-day workshop was organised including lab tours, student presentations, and several discussion rounds, as well as some social events.
The meeting was a great opportunity to meet face to face with our US collaborators and learn more about the research the different universities are working on, as part of the AUSMURI / MURI research initiative. The technical discussions following the presentations were also extremely valuable, and new ideas for current and future experiments were determined.
In the future it will be important to have more of these collaboration events, as they present a much better opportunity to establish bonds between the different teams, compared to simply communicating via email or online meetings.