I am so happy to have found this site! I have been feeling for some time that in academia we don’t always practice what we preach. There is a lot of pressure to travel to conferences in order to advance one’s career, and I really hope this can change.
As an international postdoc living in the US, I have to balance visiting family in Israel and traveling to conferences. So far, I have managed to limit myself to only one conference in three years that demanded flying. This is an advantage of living in a city like Boston. I will continue to strive for minimal flying, and I hope we can implement a change in conference culture that will make this even easier.
I got my PhD in Biochemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, and am currently a postdoc at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.