The Scientific Poster Session.

This is a standard feature of scientific conferences.

Picture a big hotel ballroom with rows and rows of bulletin boards.

Tacked to them are shiny white printed posters.

There's a little bit of a fifth grade science fair vibe to the whole thing,

except the posters are generally less engaging and harder to make sense of. And they always kind

of look the same. They're crammed with text and technical images. Which is why when biologist

Carmela Haynes decided to do something different with her poster.

It was a bold choice.

You painted your scientific poster.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

Well, that was one moment where I was just, you know,

I was like, okay, I'm going to do this just to see what people say.

Here's the setup.

Carmela was wrapping up her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard.

She had a job offer at Arizona State.

She had just submitted a paper and it was accepted.

She was riding high. So she decided to submit to present at this International Synthetic Biology Conference, which is her field.

And I submitted an abstract, and I really, really, really, really wanted to be selected for a talk.

But instead, the selection committee was like, no talk, you can do a poster.

And so now I got to admit, my ego,

...