Conference rendezvous at BOTANY 2023

This year the Botanical Society of America annual meeting, BOTANY, was held in Boise, Idaho, where I actually currently live!

I co-taught a workshop, “Navigating Deep Learning with Digitized Herbarium Specimen Image Data”, with Rebecca Dikow, my former postdoc supervisor and Richie Hoedel, my former labmate from the Smithsonian Institution Data Science Lab, as well as other colleagues from SI and from University of Michigan; I co-organized a polyploid phylogenetics symposium, “The Ploid Thickens: Methodological Developments, Empirical Advances, and Remaining Challenges in Polyploid Phylogenetics” with Carl Rothfels, my current postdoc supervisor at Utah State University, in which I also presented new research on Syntrichia; and I co-presented a collaborative paper on historical Smithsonian women and their natural history collections in a Special Lecture Session, “Supporting Inclusive and Sustainable Research Infrastructure for Systematics (SISRIS) by Connecting Scientists and Their Specimens.” It was a whirlwind of a conference week, but it was great. Most of my postdoc lab, the Rothfels Lab, made the trek up from Logan and we had a get-together with some lab alumni, too. See you next year, BOTANY!