After BPS 2026, I am trying something new to keep the momentum going and make the most out of this experience. After leaving Moscone Center on Wednesday, I made a list of everything I want or need to do in lab thanks to what I learned at BPS. Perhaps everyone is doing this and has been doing this since their first conference except for me! Or maybe not! I encourage other attendees to try making a list right after the conference as well if you haven't tried that before i.e. if you're someone who never forget anything important. The list is very detailed and only includes around 3 experiments or analyses I want to prioritize because of the datasets I learned about at BPS or because of the great conversations I had. Like most BPS attendees, I already have a to-do list waiting for me at my day job. However, many of the talks, posters, and casual conversations at BPS were very stimulating (shout out Physical Cell Biology platform and the Organelle Dynamics posters) and I can already see how they will improve my ongoing projects.

The list is mostly populated by the little things I thought about or jotted down quickly during talks. Using the same notebook from BPS, and taking advantage of the fact that my memory is still fresh, I wrote down the kinds of details that I often forget about after conferences, like the names of papers, labs or niche techniques. The items are sufficiently specific (I hope) so that the list will be useful as I refer to it over the next few months. For example, instead of “learn about organelle phenotyping, I wrote (1) read rainbow yeast paper, Mukherji lab, 2025; (2) plot vacuole volume vs nucleus volume from large rainbow yeast dataset and compare to our lab’s smaller dataset; (3) create google scholar alert for Obara lab UCSD. Fortunately, seeing everything laid out on one long piece of paper felt purposeful rather than daunting. Other than the 3 prioritized or starred items, everything else on the list can be done quickly, like making a Google Scholar alert, as part of a starred item, like reading the rainbow yeast paper, or during an incubation step, like sending a hopeful email proposing a collaboration. In addition to memory, the sense of excitement is also fresh right after the conference, which perhaps adds its own sunny patina to the paper.

This is my first time making a list organizing my thoughts and planning out my next few months after a conference and it is because this is the first time a conference has given me this large quantity of new ideas. This was my third BPS and my favorite BPS thus far. Perhaps my reading comprehension has improved and I’m better at deducing which platforms and topics I’ll like. Perhaps I made more informed decisions when creating my schedule because I am more familiar with the names in my field. That is all possible. But I still really do think that I especially enjoyed this year’s sessions because of the content. Organelles featured more prominently this year than in 2022 or 2023. Compared to past years, I saw more talks that appreciated that cells exercise limited control over physical attributes like organelle size, cell size, and small-molecule fluctuations, and that we as scientists can characterize these fundamental limits using statistical mechanics. In other words, many talks and posters focused on what the cells or organelles are doing in native environments and conditions (measurement) and how well they can do it (theory). I hope these perspectives and this kind of science, which combines theory and experiment, once again catch the spotlight for BPS 2027.