Author: Steffi Hai-Jung Shih on behalf of the IADMS Promotion Committee

Despite a long, overnight trip delay as well as a baggage delay, I was immediately in love with the IADMS conference and its community the very first day. I’ve been looking forward to participating in the IADMS conference ever since I became a PhD student, when I heard about the conference from Danielle and Michael who are actively participating and spoke highly about it.

Pictured: Steffi Hai-Jung Shih (left), Danielle Jarvis (center), and Michael Rowley (right)

I was honored and lucky to have been selected as one of the student research award winners, but I definitely did not expect to be cued to improvise in front of everyone during the opening remarks by MJ… Although this certainly made it a lot easier for me to make new friends throughout the conference, so thank you, MJ, as well as Harkness who sponsored this award! I was also invited to the research committee meeting to experience firsthand how the committee works. A big thank you to Jatin, Tom, and all the committee members for inviting us, and I truly appreciate the hard work that goes into selecting the award winners and all the other initiatives behind the scenes.

The diversity and quality of the scientific content was really impressive, I loved how different professionals who truly care about dance and dancers’ health could interact and have an open conversation about various topics. I was proud to present my analysis on our lab’s collaborative project on dancers with flexor hallucis tendinopathy, and I was able to receive lots of very helpful feedback from experts in different areas. I was very excited and a little bit nervous about this talk as this was my first solo research podium!

Another highlight of the conference — movement sessions. We are all movers and I thought movement sessions are great for us to learn by doing. Moving along with fellow attendees to learn about pilates and neurokinetic therapy for dancers, management of shin splints and posterior ankle impingement, and many more, was quite a blast. The social events were also spot on! I enjoyed the dance performance very much, as well as the reception and the renowned IADMS dance party.

I got to also enjoy Helsinki a little bit, the beautiful park right across the hotel has spectacular colors (we don’t have this autumn/winter view in Los Angeles), salmon soup at the Fazer Cafe was delicious, the Moomin cafe was very cute (and I even ran into a fellow IADMS attendee Nicola and her family, who wrote the previous blog about getting ready for IADMS where she mentioned her family will be hunting Moomins). Going back to daily routine was quite hard, I had a magical time at IADMS in Helsinki and hope to see everyone in future years!

Steffi Hai-Jung Shih is a PhD candidate in the University of Southern California's Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy.