Today, Mark and I had an outstanding French dinner at a quaint little "Brasserie" with our colleague from UA, Dr. Arpad Somogyi. I say this primarily to point out how small the world really is. Arpad is the Director of the Mass Spectrometry facilities in Chemistry and Biochemistry and I have the pleasure to interact with him occasionally. However, it takes an opportunity like this to really get to spend some quality time chatting about life, science, etc. outside the confines of our buildings at UA. It was a very enjoyable evening!
Arpad is involved in a number of scientific research projects outside his normal duties in the facility and he was in Grenoble working with collaborators at the University of Grenoble. It's quite amazing that a group of researchers, with vastly different research programs and from the same department, find themselves in the same small town in the middle of France (in the absence of a conference, of course).
The international scientific community is quite small and high quality science is performed throughout the world, and Grenoble is no exception. In fact, Grenoble has the second largest number of research scientists in France, behind only Paris – a city that is 80 times bigger.
It was an exceptional evening and I hope to be able to do it again without having to travel half-way across the world.
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