Every year AbGradCon offers a very diverse and supportive environment for grad students and early post-docs to come together and share the latest research in the field of astrobiology. This year's conference was held on the campus of Cal Tech in sunny Pasadena where one hundred or so young investigators came from all over the world to give firsthand accounts of their research through talks and poster presentations on subjects as broad as the lakes of Europa to the emergence of the ribosome. Brian presented a short talk that covered some previous work that we published on earlier this year and introduced new research currently under investigation in the CCE. The conference was capped off by a behind the scenes tour of JPL where the atmosphere was highly energetic and celebratory as some of the first data on the Martian terrain was being beamed in from the newly operational Mars Science Laboratory.
August, 2012