Oundle School
AAAS
The Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science provides an opportunity for scientists to keep up to date with research in fields that may not be their area of specialism. It attracts top research scientist from around the world, and the numerous seminars provide an excellent overview of what is happening at the cutting edge of science.
Highlights over the past few years have included seminars from recent Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Eric Cornell, Carl Wiseman and Wolfgang Ketterle and lectures by government science advisor, Sir David King, and the founder of Google, Larry Page.
Oundle School has been attending the AAAS convention for the past eight years and numbers have grown each year – 50 pupils joined staff on the trip to San Francisco in February of this year. Although the convention is not intended for school pupils, it is accessible if care is taken in seminar selection, and it does give pupils the opportunity to immerse themselves in the excitement that exists in both life science and physical sciences at the moment: there is a real feeling in the research community that this era will be viewed as one of major scientific advance.
Our first visit to the convention took place in 2001 when the meeting was held in San Francisco; since then we have travelled to Boston, Denver, Seattle, Washington and St Louis before returning to San Francisco in 2007. Pupils and staff have time off to visit the host city, with particularly rich opportunities this year to visit the University of California, Berkley and Stanford University.
Mr. Clark, Head of Science, commented: "There have been many highpoints, but for me attending a plenary lecture on the environment given by the founder of Google, Larry Page, and hearing one of our pupils, Stuart Moss, ask if the speaker had travelled by public transport and whether he had left his computer on standby was a truly memorable moment.” Details of the 2008 meeting to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, can be found here.
