Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting Raleigh, NC for the 82nd Annual ACS Colloids and Surface Science Meeting. I only had the chance to attend a few presentations because I was manning the AIP booth. The good news is that Biomicrofluidics (the journal, not the blog) is publishing papers from the session "Electrokinetic Phenomena and Microfluidics." There is no bad news. The organizer of the meeting, Professor Orlin Velev, (NCSU) chose two excellent researchers (Dimiter Petsev, from the University of New Mexico and Patrick Doyle, from MIT) to edit the special issue. It will be online in October. You should like, check it out, and junk.
Visiting Raleigh was pretty neat, but it is very different from New York—the city is spread out. My hotel was downtown and the meeting was at the North Carolina State University campus. I arrived on a Sunday and after glancing at a map, though it would be a scenic walk to the campus. Well, it was kind of scenic, but the 95° heat completely negated any pleasure I potentially could have had from my midday saunter. Regardless, I had an excellent week and got to give away a bunch of USB drives branded with my favorite journal's web address (fyi: it's bmf.aip.org). If you were one of the lucky few that nabbed one, congratulations.
The non-meeting highlight was the reception on Tuesday evening—held in the small but nifty North Carolina Museum of Art. After wandering around taking a few pictures and stuffing my face with top-quality cuisine, I had a chance to talk to several post-docs and graduate students who seemed to be doing the same (who can blame them... you can't beat free food). Check out a few pictures from the meeting.
Anyway, keep an eye out for the upcoming special issue.