A Word From: Sandra Rehan, Olav Rueppell and Seirian Sumner

Pre-banquet cocktail hour during the Biology & Genomics Social Insects meeting in 2018.

In March 2021, researchers of the social insect community again convened at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) for the third meeting on Biology & Genomics of Social Insects—albeit virtually due to the covid pandemic. The online format did not deter these scientists from presenting and discussing the latest developments in their field. On the contrary, the number of participants this year more than doubled compared to the last iteration in 2018, and 92% of the 232 registered participants joined the lively meeting discussions on exchanging a whopping 4,462 messages and 113 files via the platform during the meeting’s 3 days!

First held in 2007, this meeting was called ‘Honey Bee Genomics & Biology Workshop’ until 2015 when it underwent a name change to reflect progress in the wider field of genomics. We asked 2021 Meeting Co-organizers Sandra Rehan, Olav Rueppell and Seirian Sumner to talk us through the renaming as it relates to the evolution of their field, as well as the effects the name change may have had on the meeting itself.  

Sandra: The first iteration of this meeting in 2007 was originally titled “Honey Bee Genomics” to coordinate efforts for the honey bee genome that had just been published in 2006.  

Olav: The Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) was one of very few Metazoan genomes available in 2006 so the focus of the first meeting was justifiably on that one particular species. A lot of those early studies created excitement because they were performed on a social insect for the very first time. But we have made a lot of progress since then that has broadened the taxonomic focus and the questions that we can ask.  

Sandra Rehan with Amro Zayed on the Nichols Biondi Hall Patio.

Sandra: Quickly thereafter, the ant and termite community started sequencing genomes and many more wasp and bee genomes became available; currently we are up to 53 bee genomes and nearly 100 ant genomes. The field exploded over the past 15 years with hundreds of researchers around the world working on social insect genomics. I have attended the past three CSHL meetings and I’ve noticed a pleasant shift in taxonomic diversity recently, especially in this year’s meeting, to reflect the reality of our research community and range of research organisms. 

Seirian: As a non-honeybee researcher, I recall being very much a minority at the 2007 meeting. I came with my poster on Polistes gene expression, and I remember being in awe of the incredible progress honeybee researchers had made. Over the years, the huge progress made in honeybee genomics laid the path for genomic analyses of other social insects and, as Sandra and Olav mentioned, the focus has now shifted to be about social insects in general. Our meeting this year included talks and posters on the full spectrum of social insects, including bees (not just honeybees), ants, wasps and termites. Today, the only thing that stands in the way of genomic analyses of a species is getting high-quality DNA/RNA (and the small matter of funding to sequence it!).

Olav: It is not only the sheer number of available genomes, but also the availability of accessible analysis tools and broadly applicable functional tools that has revolutionized the field. As organizers, we ensured that the taxonomic diversity in the program reflected this trend. The name change reflects a categorial switch, but underlying that is the continuous progress of our scientific community.

The social insect community typically meets at CSHL every 3-4 years, but does it get together somewhere else during the “off” years?

Seirian: Yes, of course. There are several other societies that run conferences; of most relevance is the International Union for the Study of Social Insects (IUSSI). 

Sandra: We meet at the international IUSSI meetings every 4 years, and the IUSSI also holds regional meetings around the world every two years. In North America, many of our researchers also meet at the annual Entomological Society of America meetings as well as the quadrennial International Congress of Entomology (ICE) meetings.

Seirian: The CSHL meeting is always carefully timed to fall in the in-between years.

What sets your CSHL meeting apart from the IUSSI meeting?

Olav Rueppell interacting with a poster presenter during the 2018 Biology & Genomics of Social Insects’ poster session.

Sandra: The meetings I mentioned include genomics but typically also focus on the behavior, ecology and evolution, as well as applied questions in our field.

Seirian: To add to that, the meeting at CSHL has a specific focus on genomics that is useful for a more specialist audience as talks and posters can dive in deeper and more quickly. 

Olav: In addition to being very thematically focused, this meeting is quite unique because it emphasizes unpublished cutting-edge results and is restricted to one session (meaning it does not have parallel sessions).

Sandra: This meeting is typically small and intimate, and the on-site housing makes for a wonderful networking experience. 

Olav: The intimate size is great at encouraging conversations.

Meetings at CSHL are indeed well-known for their intimate size. But are there groups not attending this meeting that could benefit from participating? 

Seirian: By being at CSHL, these meetings possibly fall off the radar for people who study social insects from the more ecological (non-molecular) perspective. And this is a shame as attending these meetings is a great way to learn about the exploding field of genomics and can take our study of social insect biology to a new level. So, whilst it is a very popular meeting among those who already work on the genes side of social insects, I think it's a very valuable opportunity for others; especially early career researchers who may like to broaden their approaches.

Sandra: New early career investigators would find this meeting very useful for networking and career development. It also provides insights into new and emerging questions in the field, which is wonderful for shaping future research directions and collaborations.

Olav: The opportunity to network in a great environment, plus the high quality of talks and focus on innovative studies make this an attractive meeting for everyone. So, in my view, everyone interested in understanding the biology of social insects--particularly from a genomics perspective--would benefit from this meeting.

Seirian Sumner checking out the posters in Nichols Biondi Hall.

Was there a scientific development presented at this year’s meeting you are most excited about?

Olav: The broad comparative analyses of many genomes to understand social evolution and the reports on single-cell sequencing that allow an unprecedented resolution of our functional genomic studies were two developments that I found very exciting.

Sandra: Yes, the use of single cell RNAseq (scRNA-seq) across honey bees, paper wasps and ants was exciting to see. This is a relatively new technology to our community and it’s being implemented in leading labs across North America and Europe.

Thinking back on all the years you’ve attended this meeting, what is your favorite memory of it?

Sandra: The closing banquet and daily mixer sessions are my favorite parts of this meeting. CSHL is such a uniquely tranquil place to talk science while overlooking the water on the open lawn. Three years ago, I remember sitting on picnic tables to discuss new ideas and form international collaborations that have since resulted in major research funding, a review paper this year, and ongoing working relationships.

Seirian: Lobster. I'd never had a whole lobster before the 2015 meeting and a grant was hatched over those lobsters that ended up being funded! I recommend eating to get the creative juices going. 

It’s safe to say that we all prefer in-person meetings but was there an aspect of the virtual format that you liked? What portion(s) of the meeting were enhanced by the virtual format?  

Seirian: Personally, I can't wait for face-to-face meetings to resume. What I love about conferences are the chats outside of the talks, getting to know the people whose papers I've read, and making new friends with a shared love of these quirky insects. But equally, the forced move online for conferences is making a huge difference to inclusivity for people around the world especially those who don't have the funds to travel; particularly those in developing countries, and those who have caring commitments that preclude them taking time away from family. The other thing that was fun was the 'online chat' whilst the talks were going on. At an in-person meeting, you can't lean over to a colleague and ask them a question about the talk but when it's online, you can have a running discussion alongside the talks, which can enrich what you get out of it. 

Sandra: Slack indeed allowed for ongoing discussions and shared resources not easily possible in an in-person format. It provided a safe space for students and researchers to converse, and ask questions of speakers that they could answer in their own time. Many ongoing and stimulating conversations were new to this meeting thanks to the addition of Slack and I hope it continues.

Olav: I too liked that we were able to have a larger and more diverse group of attendees than in previous years. The relatively high price tag of an in-person meeting made it unintentionally exclusive, which we fortunately were able to overcome this year thanks to the online format. Maybe a hybrid model can be offered in the future to encourage a broader, more diverse and equitable participation.

Thank you to Olav, Sandra and Seirian for “socializing” with us about Biology & Genomics of Social Insects, which returns to CSHL in March 2025. For information on this meeting, be sure to regularly check here.

A Word From: Matthew Stanton

Matthew Stanton, center, during an oral session coffee break at the 2017 RNA & Oligonucleotide Therapeutics meeting.

Nucleic Acid Therapies was among the first meetings to kick off our 2021 program of virtual meetings, and it marked the first year it was organized under this name. For six iterations dating back to 2010, it was known as the CSHL ‘RNA & Oligonucleotide Therapeutics’ meeting. The renaming, as Matthew Stanton (Chief Scientific Officer at Generation Bio and meeting co-organizer) explains below, was done to better reflect the ever-evolving field. The scope of the 2021 meeting was broadened to ensure advancements in the field were captured.

Matt first participated in the 2017 RNA & Oligonucleotide Therapeutics meeting before joining its team of organizers in 2019. He returned as co-organizer for this year’s virtual meeting and the inaugural program under the new ‘Nucleic Acid Therapies’ name, and he’ll be back as co-organizer in 2023. We reached out to Matt to chat about this year’s meeting, the name change, and the virtual format.

Your meeting was renamed this year. Could you share the reason? Is it because the field has evolved over the past decade? Did the renaming change the meeting in any way?

You’re correct to note that the field is ever evolving so we wanted to broaden the scope a bit. There are two technical considerations that are somewhat unifying in this space: solutions to deliver nucleic acids and resolving challenges of innate immune stimulation. Those challenges exist regardless of whether or not the nucleic acid is a small RNA oligo, a large messenger RNA or even a DNA. Recently, we’ve expanded the topics covered at the meeting to include gene editing and mRNA vaccines, and we anticipate potentially layering in non-viral gene therapy as that field evolves. 

Are there other meetings similar to Nucleic Acid Therapies? If so, what sets this meeting apart from those meetings?

I think the annual Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society meeting is most similar in content. What differentiates the CSHL meeting is the setting first and foremost: This meeting is unique in attracting senior PIs through to students just starting their careers. It’s a small, intimate setting, and the informal, non-presentation interactions are what I have found to be the most satisfying. Staying on campus really makes for a wonderful experience, and I can’t wait to get back on campus in 2023!

Speaking of participants, who else would benefit from attending this meeting, and why?

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This meeting does a great job of covering what is most timely, with particular attention to data quality and interpretation, so anyone working in the field can benefit -- both academics and industry scientists. 

Thinking back on your 2017 and 2019 attendance at this meeting, what is your favorite memory of it?

The presentation Adrian Krainer gave in 2017 on Spinraza after its approval and how inspirational that was.

It’s safe to say that we all prefer in-person meetings but was there an aspect of the virtual format that you liked? Did the virtual format enhance any portion(s) of the meeting?

I thought the virtual format allowed many more participants from across the globe to join the meeting that normally would not be able to attend in person. I also wonder if the Q&A format of the virtual meeting—submitting questions via chat feature of Zoom--lowers the barrier to asking and results in more questions from those who are not “the usual suspects”. 

In the Q&A portion of oral sessions at our virtual meetings, participants submit questions via the Zoom Chat feature along with their career level and institution. The ‘barrier’, as Matt said, is lower than asking questions in a large auditorium that may be filled with senior scientists and luminaries. Furthermore, any questions not answered during a virtual Q&A can be discussed at our Discussion Zone, and they are also transferred to the meeting Slack channel where the dialogue continues. This format has evened the Q&A-playing field, resulting in noticeably more questions and active engagement by early-career researchers across many of our meetings.  

Thank you to Matt for sharing insight into Nucleic Acid Therapies, which returns to CSHL in March 2023. For information on this meeting, be sure to regularly check here. And for cutting edge RNA research next year, be sure to check out our Regulatory RNAs meeting.

A Word From: Charla Lambert & Stephen Matheson

The CSHL Scientific Writing Retreat is a four-day writing workshop offered annually in the fall at the stately Banbury Center. Guided by their main principle that “there’s no good scientific writing, there’s only good writing” the retreat aims to provide its participants with expert feedback on their specific writing project, and the environment to “get away” and write.

 This past April, Co-Instructors Charla Lambert of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and Stephen Matheson of Cell Reports organized the first-ever one-day virtual refresher course and reunion for their alumni. The refresher course was also attended by past coaches and followed by an alumni social.

A peek into “The Stephen Matheson Show” during the 2020 virtual edition of the writing retreat.
Image: Charla Lambert

We met up with Charla and Stephen to chat about their workshop, beginning the discussion with what inspired the format of the workshop.

Stephen: That is definitely a question for Charla because this is totally her invention. I think I’ve got this right, that the retreat was modeled after other programs at CSHL?

Charla: The format I dreamed up was patterned a little after the leadership workshop CSHL ran each spring for nine years. It was part didactic or lecture, part small group work, with lots of role playing and open discussions so people could bring their own experiences and get what they need out of the workshop. I also patterned the writing retreat after the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, which is an annual, week-long workshop taught by science journalists for non-science writers. I did that workshop while in graduate school and it was lectures in the morning, meetings with small groups, retreating to your rooms to write something each day, trying out different styles, getting lots of feedback, and revising. That totally informed how I wanted to structure the CSHL retreat, so people had good chunks of time to be able to work on their own.

Given the high volume of applications this course receives, this question might be unnecessary but I’ll ask it anyway: Did you for notice a need for this type of workshop?

Charla: There was definitely a need for this kind of training, this hybrid between teaching good writing principles and just letting people get away from their lives to focus on what they’re writing. And specifically, there was a need at the postdoc and junior faculty level. Postdocs in particular tend to be forgotten by their universities, so this kind of program serves a unique niche.

Stephen: The need for scientists to learn how to write is something an editor like me knows painfully well. Charla didn't have to convince me of the reasons to have a scientific writing retreat!

The Scientific Writing Retreat has been offered in-person every fall since 2015 and virtually in 2020. Excluding the workshop last year, how has it changed over the past iterations?

Stephen: We changed how we cover writing for non-expert audiences. In 2015 and 2016, we worked with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which runs great programs in science communication for scientists. They helped us with a lot of things, then we struck out on our own and designed our own module in 2017. I do a lot of writing for general audiences; I’m skilled at it and Charla is too so we’re qualified to do it. We also added new coaches like Jackie Jansen who have a lot of experience in this area.

Charla: What we’re trying to do is not necessarily teach people how to write or speak to a lay audience in general, but how to write for non-experts in very specific areas where scientists have to do it: Grants, abstracts for some journals, faculty websites, things like that. How you go from being a scientist to a skilled writer for a lay audience ended up being too much to accomplish in one evening. So we focused it to something more manageable and accessible.

Stephen: I’ll add that we’ve done this more and more empathetically in recent years. One of the hardest things you can ask a scientist to do is to talk to a person outside their field about their work. It’s also one of the most important, I think. And it calls for a little bit of empathy.

Charla: Before, we would just tell the trainees what they were doing wrong without acknowledging that writing for non-expert audiences is a really hard task. It’s really hard to talk about your own science, which you live and breathe, in a way that is accessible, understandable, and exciting to someone who’s not in your field. Injecting some empathy into the exercises to explicitly acknowledge that has helped some of the trainees work through the mind blocks they had with this kind of writing in the past.

In addition to one-on-one time with the various coaches, the trainees break into smaller groups. Do these groups form randomly or do you break them up using certain parameters? If so, is it based on field of research?

Sign-up board for one-on-one time with the various writing retreat coaches.

Charla: That’s another big change that we made. The first year of the retreat, I tried to accept applicants so the small groups contained people in the same discipline. The reasoning was that it might be important to have someone in your discipline in your small group to help work through very specific, technical passages. By the second year though, it was apparent that it was much more valuable for people who were working on the same thing to get together in small groups. Postdocs working on fellowship applications, people working on manuscripts that are computational, people working on manuscripts that are experimental, R01 grants, faculty job applications, etc. Everybody comes to the retreat from some area of biology and we group them together not necessarily on discipline, but rather what they’re working on. I think it’s worked out better: Once a person hears feedback from people in their small group and some of the coaches about potential issues with their writing, they can start to recognize that issue in their own writing.

Stephen: I’ll echo that and I’ll give a specific example. In my group once, someone brought a paper they were drafting. The introduction described two kinds of disease: inherited and sporadic. I know what ‘inherited’ and ‘sporadic’ are, and so does the person who wrote it, but another very smart person who wasn’t a geneticist didn’t and asked, “Now, what is ‘sporadic’?” It stopped all of us.

Charla: That’s a good question.

Stephen: Then we all realized, depending on the audience (which is one of the biggest questions a writer has to ask when they’re writing anything), you might have to stop and tell us what sporadic means. There’s a little piece of jargon that a smart person caught and, had we all been geneticists, there’s no way we would have thought of that.

I like how we’ve tweaked it though. We get feedback from students and we consider it very carefully. So the retreat changes a little every year. And it should, right? I like that. I’m proud of that.

Can you share some insight into what you look for when reviewing applications and choosing the next crop of trainees?

Stephen: We do have a particular demographic in mind, and it’s not just anyone who’s a scientist. This retreat is designed and optimized for postdocs and junior faculty.

Charla: One of the other big filters I use when reading applications is: Does an applicant have something they’re working on? I will usually filter out somebody who just wants to come and learn good writing, but doesn’t have a piece they’re actively working on. But someone who wants to learn how to write well and can also describe a manuscript they’re struggling to draft, or a fellowship deadline they’re working toward, that’s the kind of applicant I look for.

Stephen: Some people might legitimately want to participate in the retreat because their English is developing and they want to strengthen their English writing skills. Unfortunately, if they’re not already a fluent English speaker, this retreat won’t be appropriate for them.

Charla: With that said, there are plenty of people who participate in the retreat but are not native English speakers, because that’s the state of science: It’s very international. Past participants have been from institutions across Asia, Europe, North and South America. We just look for people who are reasonably fluent in English so they can focus on communicating their science, not necessarily struggling with their English.

The CSHL Banbury Conference Center provides the perfect setting to “get away” and write. But add snow and an endless supply of snacks and hot beverages into the mix? We’d be hard pressed to imagine an even more ideal place to work on a writing project (and what the 2018 retreat participants were treated to)!
Image: Charla Lambert

How is this retreat different from other writing workshops?

Stephen: Are there any?

Charla: I think the niche for this is the career-level we target, and the fact that people spend large blocks of time working on something that is their own.

Stephen: When I first told my colleagues at Cell that I’m going to be part of this, every single person reacted with “Oh that’s great! How often do they do it?” When I told them the retreat is held once a year, they responded with “Well that’s not enough!” So there’s a strong sense among myself and my colleagues that this so clearly meets a basic training need. It’s not fair to ask mentors to do what we’re able to do -- we can concentrate resources here that no postdoc mentor can do at any big lab. I’d like to see it reproduced actually, and used on a couple of coasts.

Charla: We’ll go national.

Stephen: I mean it’ll be franchised, obviously so.

Charla: One of our guiding principles is that there’s no good scientific writing, there’s only good writing. We focus on good writing principles in general, and how they apply in different contexts for different writing projects. So it’s not how to become a savvy grant writer for the NIH, and it’s not how to get a paper published at Cell. It’s not that kind of retreat. It’s more about how to become a good writer and will you leave after 4 days making significant progress on something you’re working on. I think that makes the retreat very different than a lot of other workshops people might take at their home institutions.

Last question: Does the course have a trainee success story?

Charla: In the first year, we had a trainee who was almost a mid-level PI and not a native English speaker. She had one R01 application rejected and this was her make-or-break point: if her next application wasn’t funded she basically had to leave her institution. She worked side-by-side with one of our coaches, Sydney Gary, and her proposal ended up being funded.

Stephen: One year, one of the students went to three coaches in a row, showing us her abstract. I don’t know if she was testing us.

Charla: She was collecting data.

Stephen: I was the last one and when I was done she said, “Wow. That’s really impressive. I showed all of you my abstract and you all made the same suggestions.” It’s gratifying when people realize there’s actually a well-defined ball of knowledge, expertise, and skill that they can acquire and actively work on.

Many thanks to Charla and Stephen for taking the time to speak with us about their workshop. The Scientific Writing Retreat will be held again in November so if you are working on a writing project and find yourself “stuck,” be sure to check out this year’s course. Charla and Stephen are welcoming applications until September 13, 2021.

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