This week, we hosted the tenth CSHL meeting on Telomeres & Telomerase. Since it was first held in 1999, the meeting has consistently attracted a large number of junior scientists: more than half the participants have been graduate students or postdoctoral scholars overall, and 55% of this year’s attendees are junior scientists. Women are also well-represented at the meeting: they make up 46% of the meeting participants across all ten iterations and 48% of this year’s attendees.

We checked in with Roger Reddel, a long-time participant and returning organizer, to get his take on the meeting and how it continues to serve the telomere community. 

The program for each of the ten meetings has been organized according to the same set of principles, with essentially all of the talks being chosen by the organizers from submitted abstracts, based on the quality of the abstracts, how well they fit with the session themes, and the requirement that most of the data must be unpublished at the time of abstract submission. The session chairs are invited to nominate for oral presentation one abstract from their own lab that meets these criteria. Model organism research is always very well represented. 

The talks and posters at the 2017 meeting have demonstrated the continuous, exciting advances being made in most areas of telomere research, with much of the recent progress resulting from creative applications of new research technologies. Also, attendance at this meeting has been very similar to previous years—despite visa problems experienced by some of our colleagues—which I think reflects the pivotal role it continues to play in this research area.

Thank you to Roger for taking the time to chat with us. For more conversations with our other meeting organizers and course instructors, go here. Also, to gain a participant’s perspective on this meeting, read our Q&A with Borja Barbero.