| When I think back to Cannabis Conference (just last week!), a highlight reel of stories flashes by in my mind. It was a terrific event, and our team had a great time engaging with CBT readers from around the world. We couldn’t be more excited with how this event has grown over the years, and already we’re talking about what we can do for our seventh annual event next summer in Las Vegas. If it feels at times like a chaotic moment in the cannabis industry, it’s also an enlightening one. We’re all learning a lot about ourselves in this business. But one thing I loved seeing was a series of brief exchanges at the very end of the first session on the first day of Cannabis Conference. I was in the room for the All-Access session, “University Research Roundup: The Latest In Cultivation Science,” which featured Dr. Raymond Cloyd, Dr. Bruce Bugbee and Dr. Michael Gutensohn, three university professors from Kansas, Utah and West Virginia. They each shared their latest insights from work in the lab or in the field. This is important stuff: It’s only a recent phenomenon, this university-led research into cannabis cultivation. The three professors took a minute to expound on the gravity of this emerging work—and the dearth of public funding and support for it. The audience was keyed in from the start, with CBT readers asking great questions and picking up crucial ideas for their own cannabis operations back home. But here’s what I loved most: After the session, audience members rushed to the stage to take selfies with these guys. It was like a scene from a rock show! Here were three professors, each one steeped in niche science and based in a state that doesn’t immediately scream “cannabis,” and they were being mobbed like the stars that we at CBT have known them to be. That was a very cool sight: the normalization and the thrill of cannabis research in the mainstream. Keep an eye out for those researchers’ bylines in CBT, by the way; the people want more! -Eric Sandy, Digital Editor | 