Write your ticket to the stem cell science event of the year

Beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia home to this year's ISSCR Annual Meeting

For many stem cell scientists one of the highlights of the year is going to the annual International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) conference. It’s like Disneyland for researchers. This year the event is being held in Vancouver, Canada. But many younger scientists won’t be going because they can’t afford it. So UC Davis researcher and avid blogger Paul Knoepfler has teamed up with ISSCR to help one lucky scientist go. Here’s Paul’s guest blog explaining how they can apply:

What’s better than a four-day stem cell meeting held in beautiful Vancouver, B.C. that includes all of the newest and most cutting edge research?

If, like me, you are a lover of all things stem cell your first impulse may be to shout out “nothing!” and I am betting you will already know that I am talking about the ISSCR Annual Meeting being held this year in that fantastic locale.

However, the answer I had in mind is that the only thing better than going to ISSCR is getting to go to that meeting for free.

How do you get to that stem cell happy place?

I have teamed up with ISSCR to run a contest with the prize being free registration to the ISSCR meeting that runs from June 18-21.

All you have to do is write a short essay addressing this topic: why do I want to go to ISSCR 2014?

The winner gets free registration and their essay gets published on my blog to be read by the stem cell community.

For a few additional rules and details, check out the announcement of the contest here.

The deadline for entries is Friday May 30th. The winner will be announced on Monday June 2nd.

What am I looking for in a winning essay? As a stem cell researcher and writer myself, I am hoping to get entries that are clever, creative essays that convey genuine, interesting reasons for wanting to go to this great meeting. You will have to be concise too because the limit on length is a strict 300 words.

There may be additional entries published on my blog if more than one really wows me, and other perks like stem cell swag for entrants could come into play depending on the number of entrants and the quality of their writings.

So start brainstorming and writing and then send your entries to me at knoepfler@ucdavis.edu.

I hope to see you in Vancouver.

Paul Knoepfler