Aberdeen Meeting Report

Day 1

As a second year PhD student, going to conferences is always a mixture of excitement to meet new people and learn about their science, but also nerves and apprehension around fitting in or being around others with years of experience on you. I think it’s safe to say the Platelet Society meeting was just pure excitement.

The main meeting sessions were structured as a plenary speaker followed by four presentations from selected abstracts. The plenary speakers for the day were Dr Leo Nicolai (LMU, Germany) and Professor Alison Goodall (University of Leicester and winner of the Platelet Society Gus Born award 2022). I think it was great to see a variety of researchers at different stages of their career, all with something new to bring to the table. Lunch gave the opportunity for people to network and visit the posters – there was plenty of time to enter long discussions with the poster presenters about their work! Meeting other fellow ECRs and seeing their talks on the ECR day also made it very easy to approach people.

The final session enabled company sponsors to give more of an insight to their products and research vision. This was followed by a Platelet Society update which highlighted some great schemes and outreach programmes which I wasn’t aware of!

Of course, my favourite part was the evening network – a street food buffet and drinks what more could you want! I thought the street food dinner was a great idea as it provided lots of variety for everyone, and also allowed everyone to mingle with many different people rather than just those on their table. And finally, there was the Ceilidh – again this brought everyone together and in such a fun way. Certainly, some of the Professors brought their dancing shoes!

Day 2

Following on from a fun evening of street food buffet and energetic Ceilidh, Day 2 of the meeting kicked off with an amazing plenary talk from Dr Alice Pollitt (University of Reading) who spoke about the communication of platelets by forming synapses and showed some awesome advanced microscopy videos and images which I found very impressive. Based on the questions that followed, I think the rest of the audience also felt the same and really enjoyed this talk.

The second plenary of the day was given by Dr Sarah Westbury (University of Bristol) who gave a great talk on the phenotyping and genomics of inherited bleeding disorders and gave her interesting perspectives on how laboratory and clinical medicine can be used in combination to make progress for patients.

The final plenary talk was from Professor Khalid Naseem (University of Leeds) who took us through his research career from early on to more recently and contained lots of intriguing scientific stories on platelet signalling involving CD36. He also discussed what is still to be answered in relation to platelet function and CD36 activation. As an ECR, I really enjoyed listening to how a project develops from an observation to then become years and years of research and results.

Throughout the day there were short talks from predominantly early career researchers including myself and the talks were fantastic. I particularly enjoyed hearing about the use and developments of a diverse range of techniques in platelet research including microscopy, flow cytometry, genomics, mouse models, modelling, nanobodies and PROTACs. These sessions really showcased the future directions of platelet research and importantly gave the future leaders in this field the chance to experience presenting to a large audience. As a presenter, I really cherished having the opportunity to present my research to an audience of expert platelet researchers.

Outside the talks, it was great to see a broad range of novel topics in the poster presentations. During the poster session (and following on from lunch!), the atmosphere in the room was lively with lots of exciting discussions taking place, both at the posters and the sponsors booths. Overall, it was a wonderful day with lots of interesting platelet research being presented and discussed.

I have thoroughly enjoyed attending the Platelet Society Meeting and look forward to future meetings. I would highly recommend attendance for early career researchers as this is the perfect type of meeting for us due to it being a small meeting and there being a focus on ECR presentations (there is even a dedicated ECR day!). This creates the opportunity to really have your research heard by the platelet community.

Out next Platelet Society Meeting will be held on the 23rd – 25th April 2025 in Manchester – see the webpage for more details