The 2025 IAS Conference: A Celebration of Scientific Research and Learning

Research conferences are a wonderful way to get involved in the broader scientific community, as well as to present and talk with others about cool or interesting research that you’ve been working on. I had the opportunity to attend the IAS (Indiana Academy of Science) conference earlier this year and had a great experience doing so! I was able to meet other members of the scientific community, present the research I had been working on during the past summer, and learn a great deal about other fields of scientific research. I would like to invite readers to take a tour with me through my experience at the IAS conference this year.

Introductions and Welcome

Arriving early in the morning, I was able to set up my oral presentation ahead of time and engage in both breakfast and conversation with other members of MU-WCOM who were also attending, including professors and students. The welcoming ceremony included a welcome from the president, our very own Dr. Samina Akbar! It was fantastic to see the professors from our university engaged with the conference! After the introduction, we all split away to view various oral presentations that piqued our interests.

Presentations and Posters

Since it can feel quite difficult to see what’s happening in the world around you while in medical school, I wanted to view some presentations that were outside of my usual areas of interest. All types of scientific research are presented at IAS, from chemistry to biology, ecology to physics, and even mathematics! I bounced between presentations in various fields of study, with some of my favorite talks being in fields that I have never formally studied (some of them went right over my head)! I believe that the interdisciplinary research presented makes it a joy to attend and is one of the highlights of the conference!

Poster presentations followed oral presentations. It was staggering to walk into a giant auditorium with a total of 157 posters being displayed! I walked from poster to poster, engaged with the students discussing the research they worked so hard on, as well as cheering on my fellow MU-WCOM students.

We brought wonderful posters from MU-WCOM, mainly from Dr. Erin McClelland’s lab (with a focus on C. neoformans and how it interacts with the host) and Dr. Samina Akbar’s lab (researching, profiling, and sequencing antibiotic-resistant bacteria in bodies of water). There were wonderful students from both Dr. McClelland’s and Dr. Akbar’s labs in attendance, as well as other students to learn more about the research presented at the conference.

I also volunteered ahead of time to judge a poster, and it was an amazing experience to speak with a student in-depth about their experiences and the tribulations that led to the final poster. The poster presentations were my favorite part of the day, and I wished that I could spend more time looking at each one, but alas, for the rest of the day, we had more oral presentations, including my own and from the other students from my lab.

I had spent time over the previous summer researching C. neoformans and how it interacts with macrophages. I was excited to share my research with others involved in microbiology. Presenting to a knowing audience was a breeze, and the practice of my presentation had paid off. It felt cathartic to be able to give a proper presentation with full figures and graphs on what I had spent much of my summer working on. Everyone, especially my fellow MU-WCOM students, was very supportive and each gave wonderful presentations in turn.

Awards and Closing

As always, all good things must come to an end. After an intriguing keynote presentation on “zombie” or behavior-altering parasites and the final oral presentations, we enjoyed the awards ceremony and mixer. I wanted to give a special congratulations to MU-WCOM’s Dr. Tina Mason for receiving one of the awards offered at IAS. Congratulations, Dr. Mason!

Overall, I had an excellent time at this year’s IAS conference! I would encourage other first- and second-year students at MU-WCOM to look into pursuing research in their interests, or if they have already done research, to consider presenting at IAS this coming year. It was a fantastic experience to learn and grow as both a researcher and an osteopathic medical student.

About the Author

Austin Fairman is a third-year medical student at the Marian University Tom and Julie Wood College of Osteopathic Medicine. He is originally from Spokane, Washington, and received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Eastern Washington University. He has a passion for Emergency Medicine, is actively involved in mentoring upcoming medical students, and is interested in academic medicine.