Over the week, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory hosted participants of the Wiring the Brain meeting. Started in 2009 by Kevin Mitchell, the first two iterations of the biennial meeting were held in Ireland before it was relocated across the pond to New York for the last three meetings.

We checked in with Kevin for a brief Q&A conversation regarding the Meeting and the role it plays in bringing together scientists and creating learning and collaborative opportunities.

The Wiring the Brain meeting is really about bringing people together from different disciplines who are all interested in the same thing but coming at it from very different angles. So we’ve got people working on development of the brain, genetics, neuro-developmental disorders, down at the cellular level and all the way to psychiatry and psychology, how these systems actually work. And the powerful thing is that most of the time those people don’t necessarily talk to each other and when they do they can find that they have these similar interests and a lot of interesting collaborations can come out of these things where people with different skill sets, different perspectives see that overlapping interest and develop powerful new ways to approach these problems...You think you’re working on the same thing but when you see a totally different angle on it, it opens up new windows of investigations.

Also, thank you to Kevin for taking the time to chat with us. For more conversations with our other meeting organizers and course instructors, go here.

Also, if you're interested in the topic, make sure to follow Kevin on Twitter or his blog because if there's one thing Kevin knows about...it's @WiringTheBrain.