A Word From: David Belin, Antonello Bonci, Christopher Evans & Brigitte Kieffer

Last year, we hosted the now-annual summer course on the Cellular Biology of Addiction. The formerly biennial course was started by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2001 and in 2014, it was introduced in Europe to serve and train researchers based in European and African countries. During odd-numbered years, the course is held at the Banbury Conference Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and in even-numbered years, it’s at Gonville & Caius College in the University of Cambridge. We sat down with instructors David Belin, Antonello Bonci, Christopher Evans, and Brigitte Kieffer to chat about the course and the changes it’s undergone over the last 16 years. Our conversation began with an overview on the day-to-day life of a Cellular Biology of Addiction trainee:  

Christopher: Each day begins with breakfast where we, along with the lecturers, eat and chat with the trainees about topics ranging from science to their careers. Then we head to the Conference Center and listen to the first lecture of the day, where there are a lot of questions and discussions. Often, trainees will ask “How did you do that in that experiment?” or “Can I get a copy of your poster which shows how this works?” After a break, we’ll have another lecture before lunch, which has the same format as breakfast: everyone chats, asks questions, and maybe discusses a specific topic which came up during the talks. The afternoons are variable because sometimes we have another lecturer or two, sometimes the trainees present their work, sometimes we’ll have a pool party, etc.

Antonello: But the constant is that there’s nonstop interaction – during a lecture, pool party, dinner, or after dinner we are always together. 

 David: The trainees also present data themselves during one afternoon of the course. It’s kind of like speed dating for presentations. Each trainee has three minutes to convey what they’re doing and the prospective outcomes of their work, and then we have a five-minute group discussion. 

Also fairly new to the course is the grant writing workshop. Each of the faculty design a call for proposals, like a five-year grant for $2 million on optogenetic control in addiction. The trainees team up, choose a call and, within 90 minutes come up with a proposal idea they need to defend. We carry this out as a game and score their performance as a group on issues like feasibility and timelines, with the goal of getting everyone involved and learning from each other. The team that performs best receives a bottle of champagne, which we often drink together.  

This itinerary wasn’t always the norm. In fact, a typical day during the early years of the course was so packed with lectures and information that it left little time for participants to digest and appreciate the knowledge they’d learned or the people they’d met: 

Christopher: In 2001, when I first joined the course, it was much more intensive on lectures – it was just about information. It’s evolved now so there’s much more time for discussions and interactions.

Brigitte: Originally, there were about 4 speakers per day and each speaker had 2 sessions. So we had talks all day – it was very intense. 

Christopher: It was too intense. The trainees needed time to digest and meet with faculty. As the course evolved, we also folded in things like grant writing and other tools to help the next generation succeed as independent researchers.

Antonello: Basically, the course has become more career-focused to give participants all the possible information and options that we can. It’s much more long-term now, about their futures.

Christopher: Also we now have a rule where the trainees are the first ones to ask a question during invited talks. Lots of course faculty always want to ask questions but we make them wait. 

Antonello: The questions from trainees are awesome.

Christopher: Absolutely. We encourage them right from the beginning of the course to express themselves and ask what they need.

David: Hopefully, one day, the faculty will be intimidated when they come for the course. That’s our aim: for the trainees to make them sweat, to squeeze their brains. It happened to me last year. One of the trainees gave an incredible presentation that blew my mind and I was just like, “Whoa, she’s better than me.” She’s now an invited speaker – someone who was a trainee last year is a speaker this year. And that’s beautiful. The course is dynamic and flexible, it’s open to new ideas and new people.

Antonello: We had another lecturer this year who had prepared about a hundred slides for her two-hour talk. She reached slide number 6 because the trainees asked questions non-stop. So that gives a glimpse of their level of excitement and curiosity. 

Brigitte: Yes. The course is interactive, all the time. And every year, we have pretty young investigators as invited speakers which is very important, because they’re the role models for trainees, the examples. 

We switched topics to discuss the developments they’re most excited about. Technological advances were at the heart of this discussion and they all agreed that, even as new technologies become available and bridge gaps, it’s important to remember that they’re just tools.

David: There are new developments on every front, every month that are all exciting. Most of the new breakthroughs are technological, though I don’t want the next generation in addiction research to be technology driven; that’s something we try to convey in the course. Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen many papers re-inventing the wheel, re-describing something we’ve known for 50 years but with a new technique. I’m not sure that adds much to the overall picture.

Antonello: David touched on something very important. This generation of scientists is exposed to a plethora of new techniques almost on a monthly basis. These are amazing techniques. The problem is that it is easy to confuse how much novelty you can gain from a new technique, versus how much you can gain by creating a hypothesis and then using the new technique to answer your hypothesis. This seems obvious to us but it’s sometimes not obvious to younger scientists, so we always need to clarify that technology, per se, is a tool. It’s not the end goal of research because you use technology to answer questions. I think David is right in that sometimes a new technology allows you to quickly create papers but not necessarily…

Christopher: Change the field.

Antonello: Exactly…change the field. Though admittedly, technologies created in the last few years have, in my experience, created something wonderful: basic scientists and clinicians have become much closer than before. I’m referring to optogenetics and chemogenetics , techniques that turn on and off big portions of your brain. These technologies have been used to launch ideas toward the clinic where you have a variety of brain stimulation techniques. The techniques used in rodents to decode behaviors and symptoms, and those used in humans to decode behaviors and treat symptoms, are getting closer and closer, to a point where communication between basic scientists and clinicians is beginning to level. It has made basic research much more accessible to clinicians and that’s a big plus.

Brigitte: I agree completely. We have to be careful about technology being the driver, but I like to remember that technology development allows science to progress to new concepts, ideas, discoveries, to things we didn’t know and didn’t even think about. So it’s always a trade-off between progressing the technology and then progressing the biology. But of course, for young scientists, it is more difficult to step back and differentiate the two aspects. 

David: We still don’t understand exactly how we see images, contrasts, shapes, etc. We know how we perceive, but we don’t know how we have a subjective image in our head that is a reconstruction of the perception we have of the world. When you accept that, you understand that that we don’t really know why we want, or how we want, or how it goes wrong – and in addiction something goes wrong, Technology helps to bridge that gap but what’s exciting is that there’s still a gap. 

Brigitte: We really don’t completely grasp brain function, how the brain functions as a whole, and that’s exciting. It’s not like the kidney. I have nothing against kidneys or livers but the brain has several additional dimensions that are fascinating. 

Christopher: In the course we encourage all approaches, from molecular and genetics all the way to behavior. It’s great to have new techniques but you have to use them to add to the big picture. The course isn’t focused on just molecular and cellular studies anymore, like it used to be. We should really change the name to something like “Biology of Addiction” or “Addiction Science.” 

We next asked how they select course trainees from the applicant pool. To those applying for this course, be sure to craft a compelling personal statement!

David: I have always found the selection process to be difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, almost every single application is outstanding. And secondly, we’re trying to actually figure a person’s career trajectory, and whether that person will benefit more from the course than somebody else within this trajectory. It’s a best guess, right? I literally spent five days reviewing the applications for this year’s course. I guess it’s a hallmark of the success of the course: very good people apply.

Put effort into the [personal statement]. Applications that appeal to my heart are the ones with beautiful [personal statements], where the applicant tells me why they want to come to the course and why they want to come now. I rank a bit poorly the applications that clearly display a mismatch between the quality of the CV and the effort put into writing the [personal statement]. It comes off as if the applicant considers their CV to be good enough to deserve selection.

Antonello: It’s a good point. The [personal statement] is the only way an applicant can show they care about this course.

Christopher: For me, it is the reference letters that make the difference. Applicants should choose people who really know them, and not just get a big name in the field to write down a few words. 

We ended our chat by asking them to share their favorite moment from the course so far: 

Christopher: Swimming in the phosphorescence. A trainee had found something with GFP overexpression in D1 and D2 cells, and they were anxious to talk about it because it ran counter to what big shots in the field thought should happen. We helped the trainee deal with that. Established people in the field often have their set ideas, and it can be intimidating for a new scientist to present a discovery that is not in line with their thinking. We help our students develop the strength of character to deal with these situations in the field. I like to see things change, people change. The students always ask good, very insightful questions that other people haven’t thought of. 

Brigitte: The lectures are a very, very good time. The trainees’ questions are very bright, intelligent, and well-thought out. 

Christopher: Yeah, we get a lot from this course as well. There’s no two ways about it. We learn a lot.

Antonello: The beauty of this course is that each one of us brings a very different contribution to the same painting.  

The Cellular Biology of Addiction course this summer will take place between July 29th and August 5th in Cambridge, UK. Applications are being accepted until this Sunday, April 15th here. For an introduction into the course, be sure to read our Q&A with 2017 Cellular Biology of Addiction Alumna Sadie Nennig and watch videos of the talks from the 2014 course. 

For more conversation with other meeting organizers, check out the rest of our A Word From series. 

Visitor of the Week: Eduardo Aguilar

Meet Eduardo Aguilar of Rockefeller University. Eduardo is a fourth year graduate student in Charlie Rice’s lab and also works with Peggy MacDonald. He returned to campus to attend his second meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, The PARP Family & ADP-ribosylation. 

What are your research interests? What are you working on?
Generally speaking, I’m interested in using viruses to probe complex host cell biology, usually in the realm of innate immunity. I like to think of viruses as maleable stressors.

How did you decide to make this the focus of your research?
I sort of stumbled upon it, but it really set in once I realized just how much fundamental biology was historically done in viruses.

How did your scientific journey begin? 
Normally I like to say dinosaurs: Jurassic Park was all the rage when I was a kid and it got me interested in the natural sciences early.

Was there something specific about The PARP Family & ADP-ribosylation meeting that drew you to attend?
I wanted to see what’s been developed in terms of proteomic approaches, and I thought it would be helpful to see what kind of tangential research could be of use to my work.

What is your key takeaway from the meeting?
There’s a lot of important work being done in the field, but there is still so much left to do. It’s crazy, actually!

Did you pick up or learn something new from the meeting that you plan to apply to your work?  
I caught up with some previous contacts while making new ones, but I also got some supporting insights on some ideas  I’d had before the meeting.

How many CSHL meetings and/or courses have you attended? 
This is my second meeting. I attended the Retroviruses in 2015  and I applied to the Proteomics course offered this summer.

If someone curious in attending a future iteration of this meeting asked you for feedback or advice on it, what would you tell him/her?
CSHL is extraordinarily historical. It’s like a living museum in a way, yet it offers insight into some of the newest developments in various fields. It’s pretty neat when you think about it.

What do you like most about your time at CSHL?
I’d say walking around and coming across the different sculptures scattered around the campus. They’re truly striking!

Thank you to Eduardo for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured scientists - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

A Word From: John Lis and Jane Mellor

In August 2017, we hosted the fifteenth CSHL meeting on Mechanisms of Eukaryotic Transcription (MOET) and spoke with two of the meeting’s organizers: John Lis and Jane Mellor. We discussed the changes made to the meeting, and their impacts, and the organizers’ dedication to safeguarding the history of both the field and meeting.

John: The bulk of the attendees enjoyed the meeting. There are some who have been at this meeting for many decades who are still warming up to the new directions, though. I think by the end of the meeting they’ll understand why things have changed a bit. Changes are useful as long as we don’t forget the history of the meeting.

Jane: People are sometimes afraid of change. There are historical reasons why this meeting has been how it’s been, but it’s refreshing to make changes. I think the meeting now has a feeling of being much more inclusive. There are more talks now, which results in more people getting exposure.

John: And more opportunities. A number of people have been longtime attendees at this meeting but never presented a talk. We asked a few of them to give a talk this time and they were appreciative. We’ve also taken a more egalitarian style for the presentations. Rather than having 20- and 8-minute talks, every talk is 12 minutes long followed by 3 minutes of discussion. We’re trying to just pick talks, not edit or decide who has longer or shorter time slots. Everyone responded pretty well, and the speakers condensed even very complex stories into efficient presentations.

Jane: The quality of the presentations this year is actually much higher than it was when we had different talk lengths. And everybody’s gotten something from the talks: good questions, concise discussions, etc. The more established members of the community contributed older data and observations to the discussions, and that historical context is really useful for younger attendees. We have participants here with the memory of what’s happened to the field over many, many years. This is a really good aspect of this meeting that I think is valuable. 

John: Of course there’s been a substantial change in the science. The transcription field is such a rich playground – with lots of factors, sequences, and information – that it can be problematic for those entering the field. They have to gain a command of the past to use all the tools and techniques. It’s challenging but I think this meeting brings them up to speed. I hope the young folks appreciate the classic stuff that’s been done. And I hope the old folks begin to appreciate the fact that doing things genome-wide and making measurements massively on lots of factors is useful in the context of figuring out how genes are regulated. The genome provides us with the numbers and statistics that enable us to draw conclusions we couldn’t from looking at only one or two genes. It’s come out a couple of times here, where major conclusions were made on small percentages of genes that turned out to be outlier groups. 

Jane: One thing we do realize now is that a lot of genes we studied in the past were outliers. Another change worth mentioning is the evening poster sessions. I’ve always felt that the poster sessions were never long enough: We have so many brilliant posters that a 2-hour session is insufficient. The evening poster sessions – which started at 7:30 and ended whenever everyone was ready – provided a much more relaxed atmosphere. This year, people were still at the posters at 11 PM and no one was rushing around trying to visit all of them. It’s good for the poster presenters as well because there is more opportunity for lengthier conversations. 

The MOET meeting continues to attract senior members of the transcription community:

John: I think this meeting has really good representation from the field.

Jane: I would say that pretty much anyone who’s anyone in the field is here: not everybody, but most people are here. Even though this year’s meeting coincided with an EMBO chromosome transcription meeting, most of the field’s influential people are here, so MOET still has the pull and the cache to make people want to come.

The conversation wrapped up with Jane and John sharing the latest development they were most excited about:

Jane: The structural view of transcription is something that’s really come to fruition this year. According to Patrick Cramer’s talk, we are having a truly mechanistic view of the transcription process. The next big challenge is to bring in the chromosome, but what Patrick showed was just spellbinding and amazing -- model enzymes changing, what Mediator’s doing, what the rest of the PIC’s are doing, etc. Twenty years ago, we could have never predicted that we’d be in a position to do this kind of work. 

John: Structural studies with cryo-EM have been transformative. Another interesting and powerful addition is the genome-wide studies adopted by people in classical biochemistry who extend their analyses genome-wide. And then you add to that the fact that there’s this concept of phase separation, these droplets where things can happen in a very rapid way, so there may be some sort of compartment for these reactions. This has been coming up again and again and I’m beginning to take it seriously; it’s sort of changing my way of thinking.   

MOET returns to the Laboratory in 2019; and during the summer, we offer the Chromatin, Epigenetics and Gene Expression course. For an introduction into the annual course, be sure to read our Q&A with 2017 GNX Alumna Ulrike Boehm.

For more conversation with other meeting organizers, check out the rest of our A Word From series. 

Visitor of the Week: Nafisa Jadavji

Meet  Nafisa M. Jadavji of Carleton University (Canada). Nafisa is a postdoctoral fellow in Patrice Smith’s lab and a course instructor  in the Department of Neuroscience. She returned to the Banbury Campus to participate in the three-day Workshop on Leadership in Bioscience to help her be “better prepared for [her] near-future role.”

What are your research interests? What are you working on?
My research uses a mouse model to assess how nutrition affects neurological function over the lifespan. I am presently concentrating on neurodegeneration associated to stroke and dementia. My own research group will continue to work on this as well as incorporate the impact of maternal nutrition contributions on long-term offspring neurological function.  

How did you decide to make this the focus of your research?
My scientific training in the field of neuroscience started in 2002. In 2008, during my PhD with Dr. Rima Rozen’s laboratory at McGill University, I began studying – and fell in love with – how nutrition impacts brain function and I have been contributing to the field since. 

How did your scientific journey begin? 
I really enjoyed my high school science classes. During my 11th grade biology class, I learned about the brain – specifically what the synapse and neuromuscular junction are and their function – and I became fascinated with how the brain works to control our behaviours. This lead me to pursue neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge where, in 2002, I also got involved in basic research and never left.

Was there something about the Workshop on Leadership in Bioscience that drew you to apply?
As a Neuroscientist I think my training as a scientist has been extensive. However, when it comes to learning how to lead a research group and manage people, I know I lack that training. The topics covered during the workshop are very applicable to recruiting, as well as running a successful and productive research group which will be helpful to me when I start my research group . 

What is your key takeaway from the workshop?
Being the leader of a laboratory is hard work but the workshop and the tools it gave me have helped me to feel better prepared for my near-future role.

What and/or how will you apply what you’ve learned from the Workshop to your work?
Carl Cohen, the instructor, provided extensive details about interviewing potential candidates (e.g. graduate students or postdocs). He gave us tools to help make the hiring process more consistent for candidates by introducing us to score sheets for each component of the hiring process (e.g. CV, phone interview, reference checks). I will be using these score sheets and guides  as I recruit   staff and students for my research group.

How many CSHL courses/workshops have you attended?
I also attended the Scientific Writing Retreat in 2016. I enjoyed the two courses I have attended and am open to attending more in the future, as well as sending my students and staff to future CSHL courses. 

If someone curious in attending a future iteration of the Workshop on Leadership in Bioscience asked you for feedback or advice on it, what would you tell him/her? 
I would recommend the workshop to anyone who plans to hire and manage people in a scientific setting. Though highly-motivated graduate students may benefit from this course, I think senior postdocs and people who have recently started their own independent group would gain the most from the course.

What do you like most about your time at CSHL's Banbury Campus? 
I am runner and the Banbury Campus is a great place to go on an early morning run. I also enjoyed having meals with the other participants. 

Nafisa received financial support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to cover a portion of her course tuition. On behalf of Nafisa, thank you to HHMI for supporting and enabling our young scientists to attend a CSHL course where they expand their skills, knowledge, and network.

Thank you to Nafisa for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured scientists - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

A Word From: Heather Broihier & Troy Littleton

The seventeenth biennial Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meeting on the Neurobiology of Drosophila took place October 3-7, 2017. Serendipitously, the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was announced that same week and awarded to three Drosophila biologists – Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young – for their work in understanding circadian rhythms. We chatted with the meeting organizers Heather Broihier and Troy Littleton about fruit flies, the Nobels, and how both the meeting and the field have evolved in recent years.

Troy: This meeting, together with the European Drosophila neurobiology conference, are the only forums that bring the model system of Drosophila together with those who do neurobiology. Every other meeting in neuroscience or Drosophila either covers a broad range of topics outside of neuroscience or focuses on a variety of model systems. But we’re all tied together by the common tools we use in our field: even when people may not have a specific interest in a unique protein or a circuit, there are still common tools they’re using. There are so many ideas that happen from this meeting: it’s an excitement that brings a lot of people here.

Illustration: Niklas Elmehed, Nobel Media AB 2017

Heather: This is the most exciting meeting in our field and it’s really well-represented in terms of colleagues and topics. We had about 450 participants this time representing everything from the molecular genetic level all the way up to circuits and behavior. This year’s meeting was especially exciting for us because the 2017 Nobel Prize was awarded to scientists in our field on the same day the meeting started, for work that was actually initiated in Seymour Benzer’s lab. We had a Seymour Benzer Memorial Lecture this year given by Hugo Bellen, and so everything felt timely.

Troy: One of the big excitements in our field is that we span the gap from people who study single molecules all the way up to complex behaviors mediated by the large brain circuits. Being able to see the full range of science – how single molecules make the molecular engines that ultimately allow the animals to learn and behave, and studying how that’s represented across neural circuits – is really exciting. In that regard, this is a unique meeting because those in the circuit world get to experience the molecular world and vice versa. This meeting also keeps everyone abreast of the tools across both systems that help advance both fields.

Heather: There’s been a lot of tool building, especially out of Gerry Rubin’s group in Janelia. He gave a short talk on the unbelievable pace of innovation in the computational tools we have for putting together the fly connectome in the brain —for understanding how every neuron connects at a synaptic level. For many years, the implementation of the tools wasn't quite there yet. But amazing progress has been made to enable that kind of map in what Gerry thinks will be the next five years. It’s in collaboration with Google to get through the data analysis and enable these large datasets to be connected and compiled. I’m just blown away: this kind of work was not imaginable even five years ago. The talks in the circuits session really exploded this year, and there now seems to be a huge payoff from the tool development that has gone on in our field.

Troy: Technology is a big driver in our field. In prior years, we had technology talks that were organized into small subsections and, consequently, broke the community apart. This year, we decided to have one symposium dedicated to technological developments, so everyone was in the same room and heard about the great new tools coming out. It worked really well.

Heather: We weren’t the driving force behind this, but there was also a presentation this year about the 2017 Nobel Prize. It was given by attendees who had done scientific training in each of the three labs for which the Prize was awarded. They put together a really great presentation about the history of the work that provided the students and postdocs with a more immediate sense of that history. We all felt that our entire field was awarded the Prize.

Troy: The award really emphasizes that Drosophila as a model isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s a great system to understand core principles of behavior that have been conserved across evolution. The simple fly can tell us so much about basic biology and basic mechanisms of disease that have important benefits for human health.

A unique feature of this meeting are the Elkins Memorial and Seymour Benzer lectures:

Heather: The centrality of this meeting for our field is signified by the Elkins Lecture, which is an award given every two years for the best PhD thesis in Drosophila neurobiology. Troy directs the selection committee, and the winner gives one of the full-length invited lectures here at the meeting.

Troy: This year, we had 12 or 13 nominations that were just unbelievably great. It’s always a challenge to pick from the very, very best. Ultimately the selection committee – which includes former organizers of this meeting – considers the impact of an applicant’s work in the field. The 2017 Elkins Memorial Lecture was awarded to Raphael Cohn for his work on how the fly learning centers – the mushroom bodies – encode contextual information cues from the environment. It was spectacular, beautiful work that takes advantage of all the tool development and biology available up to this point.

Heather: It’s incredibly exciting that we have such unbelievably high-quality research going on in our field. This meeting really represents the best of our community.

Troy: The Seymour Benzer keynote lecture by Hugo Bellen was another high point of the meeting for me. Hugo highlighted how the fly might inform basic mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s – i.e., the links between defects and lipid metabolism in the fly that cause neurodegeneration, and the mouse or other models with ties to Alzheimer’s. For me, the twin pillars of basic science are 1) how something not related to disease works at a fundamental level, and then 2) how to take it to a different arena to inform core disease mechanisms. Both lectures this year were excellent examples of basic science.

Organizers of Neurobiology of Drosophila hold the role for only one iteration of the meeting. Here is what Heather and Troy did in 2017 to leave their mark on the meeting: 

Heather: Both Troy and I happen to be on the cellular/molecular side of the balance, so we included the meeting’s first ever Neuronal Cell Biology session. For the next iteration, the new organizers might have different interests and ways they want to highlight the strengths of our field, so it’s appropriate the organizer roles move to two different people.

Troy: It’s great to give other members of our community the opportunity to survey the field and make their own choices on what they feel are important things to bring to the meeting. Heather and I also moved the poster session to the evening and that actually turned out very well. People grabbed a beer from the bar and basically stayed as long as they wanted in the poster session.

In terms of who would benefit in attending the biennial meeting:  

Troy: There are benefits across every career level. We mostly selected junior scientists to give talks, so graduate students and postdocs get to expose the community to their work. It’s a great place for younger scientists to network with more senior people. Graduate students get to “sample” and meet with people from labs they might be considering for postdocs, and the same applies to postdocs who are beginning to go in the job market. And it comes full circle: the PIs see the junior scientists present fantastic work and we can encourage them to consider our labs for future training. Personally, I'm already cherry-picking who might fit well in my home institution and encouraging them to apply for faculty positions there.

Drosophila Neurobiology course, 1993
Can you find Troy Littleton?

CSHL also runs an annual summer short course in Drosophila neurobiology, and a large number of course participants regularly attend the Neurobiology of Drosophila meeting. In fact, Troy was a trainee in the course in 1993 and Heather was an instructor in 2009-2011! In celebration of the course’s 30th anniversary, a reception was organized during the meeting that was attended by more than 75 course alumni dating all the way back to the Class of 1989. (Check out the complete course "class photo" gallery.)

Heather: It was an outstanding way for our community to see the importance of that course. So many of us came through the Drosophila neurobiology course as students, instructors, teaching assistants, or invited speakers, so we feel tied to it. This meeting is a great way for a lot of us to get together and see old friends.

The Neurobiology of Drosophila meeting at CSHL offers a lot to every participant. Whether one attends to discover the latest technological developments, hear a presentation on the best thesis, meet new collaborators, reunite with old friends, or celebrate the Nobel Prize with peers from the field, this meeting is, as Heather said: “THE best meeting in the field!”

The meeting returns to the Laboratory in 2019; and information on our Drosophila Neurobiology: Genes, Circuits & Behavior course can be found in this webpage. To gain an inside look into the course, be sure to read our Q&A with 2017 Course Alumnus Tayfun Tumkaya.

For more conversation with other meeting organizers, check out the rest of our A Word From series.