ESR 15 and ESR 16 presents at Fera Science Symposium.

By Ellie Stone and Bilal Tariq

Each year Fera holds a Science Conference, to showcase its research and that of IAFRI in-house, as well as to government and industry representatives with key note speakers including the former Minister of State for Agriculture, Fisheries & Food and Chief Scientific Adviser for Defra. The Fera conference is very diverse in nature, covering a wide range of topics from agriculture to environmental sciences. It’s not purely a scientific event, but also covered commercial and market aspects of food and farming as well.

The in-house conference gave us the perfect opportunity to present our fledgling projects, giving us vital practise and perhaps a kinder audience to start off with! After weeks of preparation and a number of nervous practice runs, the day finally arrived and the presentation went without a hitch. So well in fact that we stunned them into silence, as the questions were not so forthcoming. However, we had good discussions within the break, spreading the word of NaToxAq and clarifying any questions they had.

After the presentation was over, it was great to relax and hear presentations on such a wide range of topics. As Fera is a large organisation that covers several environmental facets, the topics ranged from remote sensing for plant health, Rose viruses to food safety and assessing gluten in Beer by liquid chromatography. It put research topics to faces seen about the campus and put into perspective all the work and research that Fera provides. Apart from those almost all keynote speakers talked about sustainable development goals (SDG), which showed motivation and dedication of commercial and scientific society towards a sustainable future. 
Overall it was a successful first outing (or should I say inning!) and the experience will help in conferences to come.