Confidence Boost at a Conference Booth

Recently I had a week-long work "field trip" of sorts: I spent the last week of October at the Union World Conference on Lung Health in Lille, France. Actually, it qualifies as my first business trip! This was a very exciting opportunity I owe to Aeras' amazing Project Coordinator's being in her third trimester of pregnancy, as she normally is in charge of representing Aeras at our booth at this annual conference. I was really looking forward to meeting people from around the world and getting to dust off my French. However, I was also REALLY nervous about saying the right things about the organization, answering any hard questions and flying. (Gosh, traveling is awesome, but people just were not made to be shot through the air at 35,000 feet... or at least that's what my sweaty palms always tell me...)

Before leaving, I reviewed information about Aeras' tuberculosis vaccine pipeline, our mission and strategy, but I was still pretty nervous walking over to the conference center the first day the exhibit booths were open. I had never worked at a booth; I didn't know what to expect. Luckily, Aeras was co-sponsoring a booth with a European-based organization that also is working to develop TB vaccines, so I had some company and a live example of how to properly deliver our messaging to passersby. After the first few people had visited our booth, my nerves died down, and I began to really enjoy interacting with the conference attendees and became confident in my knowledge of Aeras and its mission. I got to meet doctors, advocates, and potential collaborators from Afghanistan to Zambia. And though I was in the conference center on most days from 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. or later, I was able to walk around the incredibly charming city of Lille and enjoy the local delicacies, mussels (moules) and waffles (gaufres)--but not at the same time... ew! Another highlight was getting to sit in on a session about TB diagnostics when a very kind work colleague took over booth duty for a few hours on the last day of the conference. We also got a tour of the Museum of the Pasteur Institute of Lille, which presents history on Louis Pasteur (who would have been a painter rather than a scientist if it weren't for the disapproval of his father) and Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin, who developed the first and only vaccine against tuberculosis (BCG).

This experience was meaningful for several reasons, but the two biggest takeaways were 1) having a chance to practice Aeras' messaging in an active way that improved my confidence in my ability to effectively communicate information and 2) meeting people who shared their communities' struggles with TB. It's one thing to hear figures like 1/3 of the world has TB and 1.4 million people die every year, but the cause of developing more effective tools to combat TB gained new imperative after meeting people for whom the development of a new TB vaccine would directly improve their quality of life.