the Node » Interview

Interview with BSDB poster award winner Stephen Fleenor

the Node — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:07:23 +0000

Winners of the student poster competition at the annual BSDB meeting get an amazing prize: they receive a registration for the annual SDB meeting in North America. And, vice versa, winners of the SDB poster competition get to go to the BSDB meeting in the UK.

Sadly, the winner of last year’s SDB poster competition, Tracy Chong, was unable to make it to the UK for the BSDB meeting last month. She did write a great post on the Node about her work, so you can read that to find out what her poster was about.

In Tracy’s place, Steffen Biechele attended the BSDB meeting. He was a runner-up in the poster competition, and not at all expecting to be attending the BSDB meeting until he was contacted a few weeks beforehand!

As the substitute SDB poster winner, Steffen interviewed this year’s BSDB poster winner. The poster award went to Stephen Fleenor, a PhD student in Jo Begbie’s lab at Oxford University.

Interview:

Steffen Biechele: You won yesterday’s poster competition. Which lab do you work for?

Stephen Fleenor: I work in Jo Begbie’s lab. I’ve been there as a PhD student for about six months. Prior to that I did a rotation stint for five months, so I’ve been there about a year in total.

SB: Wow, you won a post award after six months – that’s fantastic.

SF: I’m equally surprised!

SB: What was the poster about?

SF: It was largely an introduction to the system that we’re studying, and the phenotype of a knockdown that I did. I knocked down a molecule known to be a catalytic regulator of G-protein signaling, but its regulation in this manner hasn’t been characterized in our system.

SB: What system is that?

SF: Developmental cranial sensory ganglia in the chick embryo. We’re looking at the generation of neuroblasts and migration of those neuroblasts toward the site of the ganglia proper. We’re trying to figure out what’s guiding them, what’s cueing them to begin differentiation and guiding the kinetics of their migration.

SB: Have you presented a poster at a meeting before?

SF: No. This is my first conference, as well. This has all been a whirlwind of excitement!

SB: What’s next?

SF: Well, apparently I’m going to the SDB Meeting in Montreal!

At the SDB meeting, Stephen is, in turn, going to try to interview the SDB poster winner, so we should hear from him again in a few months. The poster winners at the SDB meeting are announced at the very end of the conference, so the logistics are a bit more difficult than at the BSDB, where there is still half a day of talks after the announcements. Consider it an experiment. As it goes with all experiments, we hope it will be successful, but we won’t know if it works until we try!

Interview with Beddington Medal winner Boyan Bonev

Eva Amsen — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:09:35 +0000

Each year, the British Society for Developmental Biology awards the Beddington Medal for the best PhD thesis in developmental biology. At the 2012 BSDB meeting, this award went to Boyan Bonev, who completed his PhD in Nancy Papalopulu’s lab at the University of Manchester. At the conference, Boyan gave a talk about his PhD work, describing how microRNA-9 promotes neural progenitor heterogeneity in a context-dependent manner. Find out more about Boyan’s work, and what he’s up to next, in this interview.

What was your thesis about?

My graduate work was about the role of the microRNA miR-9 in neural development. MicroRNAs are a really exciting part of the genome, because they’re small, non-coding RNAs. They were discovered about ten years ago, and since then there’s been a tremendous amount of research carried out to find out what exactly their role is. There are many occasions where microRNAs have an essential role, particularly during development. What I wanted to find out is how miR-9 regulates neural development, in particular in vertebrates. MiR-9 has a really interesting expression pattern: the microRNA is present in the brain, but expressed differently in different parts of the brain. So, the really cool thing about miR-9 is that it turned out to have a context-dependent function, and this is really the key highlight of my thesis. It means that in some parts of the brain miR-9 does one thing, and in other parts it does something else. During development it also changes its function. For example, in my talk I talked about progenitor heterogeneity, and how miR-9 can regulate this, but we also looked at its function in mature neurons, where it does something else entirely, which is to modulate axon branching and axon extension. It’s really cool how nature seems to be using one molecular mechanism in a different way, depending on where you look along the anterior-posterior axis, or at which developmental stage the organism is, to get feedback about what decisions the cells need to make.

You showed work in both frog and mouse. Which one do you prefer to work with?

To be honest I find working with both of them really exciting. Working with frogs is a little bit easier, because they develop externally, so it’s easier to get sufficient numbers and it’s easier to manipulate them from the very beginning. They’re a really good model organism for studying early developmental events in particular. However, to work on something that is more closely related to the human brain, which is ideally what we want to understand, mouse is the better system. That’s why I started to work more and more on mouse, especially in the last part of my PhD. Other than that they’re both really nice organisms to work with.

In your talk you described how a microRNA target in turn regulates the microRNA. Is that a common mechanism?

There are not that many instances where such negative feedback regulation is known, but I think it’s becoming more and more prevalent that this is indeed a very interesting type of regulation. Not just for microRNAs, but also in the case of transcription factors with negative feedback loops. I think what is really important to consider is that these transcription factors and microRNAs do not work in isolation – they all work together with all their partners. And these kind of feedback loops, whether they are coherent or incoherent feedback loops, are the ones that buffer against developmental noise or reinforce a decision. In our case this was a negative feedback loop that was doing both, because it was promoting oscillations, but it was also reinforcing developmental decisions.

What are you doing now?

I was supposed to have a bit of a long break between my PhD and before I started my postdoc, but it boiled down to about ten days in the end. Right now I’m going back to my home country, Bulgaria, to have the rest of the ten days off. At the end of the month I’m leaving for the States to start working on my postdoc.

What will you be doing in your postdoc?

That’s going to be another cool and exciting project. It’s also related to non-coding RNAs and neural development, but it’s completely different from what I’ve been doing so far. It focuses on a different, newer, type of non-coding RNAs: long non-coding RNAs. I told you that microRNAs are about ten years old - well, these long ncRNAs are about 3-4 years old.

I’m going to Harvard, where I will be working in the lab of John Rinn, who is one of the guys who discovered long ncRNAs, and in Paula Arlotta’s lab, who is an expert in mouse neural development, in particular mouse cortical development. I’m going to be working with both of them to try to figure out the function of long ncRNAs in mouse neural development.

Do you have any advice for new PhD students?

Be persistent. At some point, things will probably stop working, and you’re going to be struggling to figure out why they’re not working. What I always say is that the result is the result. Your inability to figure out why it is like that is the problem. But usually things like technical difficulties or problems with the model organism have a meaning, and you have to be persistent and really go down to the details to figure out what’s going on.

Bonev, B., Pisco, A., & Papalopulu, N. (2011). MicroRNA-9 Reveals Regional Diversity of Neural Progenitors along the Anterior-Posterior Axis Developmental Cell, 20 (1), 19-32 DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2010.11.018

Dajas-Bailador, F., Bonev, B., Garcez, P., Stanley, P., Guillemot, F., & Papalopulu, N. (2012). microRNA-9 regulates axon extension and branching by targeting Map1b in mouse cortical neurons Nature Neuroscience, 15 (5), 697-699 DOI: 10.1038/nn.3082

An interview with José Xavier Neto

Eva Amsen — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:21:03 +0000

(This interview originally appeared in Development.)

The Latin American Society for Developmental Biology (LASDB) is getting ready for their Sixth International Meeting, which will be held in Montevideo, Uruguay, from April 26th to 29th, 2012. To find out more about the society, and about developmental biology in Latin America, we talked to LASDB president José Xavier Neto, who studies heart morphogenesis at the Laboratório Nacional de Biociências in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

What are your research interests?

I have been working on cardiac development ever since I was first trained in developmental biology. From this focus on cardiac development, I slowly became interested in evolution, and in using clues that evolution gives us to understand development. I have been trying to incorporate a lot of that into our research. Another research question that I’m very interested in is: how can we use information extracted from protein structures and the evolution of proteins of interest to understand evolution and development? But my main interest has always been cardiac development.

Which organisms do you work with?

I was trained as a mouse developmental biologist, but when I returned to Brazil in 1999 after postdoctoral research at Harvard University, I quickly realised that it would have been impossible to continue my mouse research here. Working with mice is amazingly expensive, and in Brazil, at that time, we did not have the facilities to handle those numbers of mice. So I switched to chicken, and that became my primary model.

You’re president of the Latin American Society for Developmental Biology (LASDB). What’s the history of the society?

The LASDB was created in 2003. It was spearheaded by Roberto Mayor from Chile, who had the idea to create a society for young scientists returning to Latin America from their postdocs abroad. Roberto is very well connected and got a lot of support from other people connected with Latin America.

In 2003 we had our first meeting in Valle Nevado, Chile. After that we’ve had meetings in Brazil, Argentina and in Chile again. The next meeting will be in Uruguay from April 26th to 29th, 2012. Over the years, the society has grown, and it’s a great pleasure to be able to witness more and more people participating in the meeting. Nevertheless, we have been able to keep the quality of the meeting very high. That’s something that was always on everyone’s mind: we want to grow, but grow while preserving quality.

As a society you cover almost an entire continent. Are there any particular challenges in dealing with all those different countries?

Absolutely. Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile represent the major communities of developmental biologists within Latin America. There are smaller communities of investigators in other countries, but when it comes to setting up a meeting you need a lot of local support, and not all countries can support such a meeting.

This is a challenge. We would like to spread developmental biology throughout Latin America, to create a network, to get all researchers integrated, to raise opportunities for students and young researchers – but we have to rely on local support to hold meetings. As part of this mission, we’re very happy to extend our meeting to Uruguay this year. This has been a very interesting exercise. Although Uruguay is a big country, it’s not yet as easy to do things over there as it is in Mexico, Chile, Argentina or Brazil.

How does the LASDB support young researchers in particular?

The society does several things. We would like to support students with scholarships, but this has not been possible because we don’t have the money yet. What we have been doing is creating networks to link people throughout Latin America. For instance, last year members of the society founded LAZEN – a network for people in Latin America who work with zebrafish.

Another thing we have set up is the website. We realised that if you want people to connect and be involved, you should have a lively website that provides a good platform for people to interact. We’re trying to do that now, and are keeping the site alive with discussions on the forums. Through the website we also hope to encourage people to become paying members of the society, which will help raise money to set up fellowships to support students or sponsor books. But that’s for the future. At the moment we’re mainly concerned with building networks and with extending the society to all the countries of Latin America, to create a base for interaction for the society to work.

Are there any particular challenges that researchers in Latin America might have that are not commonly encountered in other parts of the world?

Yes, there are many challenges. Fortunately, in Brazil, where I work, things have turned for the good in recent years and in a very impressive manner. Science funding has been steadily increasing. Grants are reviewed by professionals within the community, and financial support has been stable. But Brazil still has classic problems. For instance, the country has a very complicated customs system that often delays supplies. Animal research is another problem because there is no professional network of animal providers. Most of the animal raising is undertaken at university centres, which have not been up to the task of breeding large numbers of high-quality healthy animals. For some areas, such as mouse developmental biology, this is a huge problem. Part of the problem is that it’s very hard for universities to hire technicians. So a lot of services have been structured on a very insecure basis, depending on people that were there for two years on a fellowship. When they left, new people would have to be trained all over again. We simply did not have all the instruments in place to set up animal facilities.

Considering these barriers, how do you make sure that people come back to their country after a postdoc abroad?

The brain drain has been a problem for all emerging countries. But I can give you a personal testimony about Brazil. I started my postdoc in 1997 in the USA, when research in Brazil was just picking up. After one year in the States I was already eager to go back because the place where I was working gave me all the opportunities that I needed to start a group doing my own research back in Brazil. The state of Sao Paulo has a funding body, called FAPESP, which has been in existence since the 1960s. They have a stable source of tax income and distribute money in a peer-reviewed fashion. If you are a young scientist in Brazil and you do a successful postdoc in the UK, Europe, USA or Japan, for instance, you stand a very high chance of getting a Young Investigator Award from FAPESP when you return to Brazil. These awards will pay for your salary, equipment and consumables for five years. That is enough time for you to move and get set up, and to find a place to get a permanent position.

I tell all my former students that are doing postdocs in the States: “Listen, Brazil really turned into a good place to start a lab.”

Is the situation the same in other Latin American countries?

Chile is ahead of Brazil in many ways. When I was in Chile in 2003 for the inaugural meeting of the society, I was very impressed: I was in the hotel where they were actually signing the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. In Brazil we’re still discussing and negotiating, but they had already done that. Chile also has a very good customs system, so things get there much more quickly than in Brazil. They have very good universities and research centres, a good funding structure and good researchers.

Argentina has always had wonderful researchers, and they have several Nobel prizes. They have a good tradition and fantastic research centres, but I’m not sure about the quality of the funding there. Uruguay still needs to spread research throughout the country, but they do have very good centres, such as the Institut Pasteur. Finally, Mexico also has wonderful universities and researchers. In the rest of Latin America, the research situation is not as good as in these countries.

What are the particular areas of research at which Latin America excels?

That’s a great question. I think we have a lot of room here for creativity, to do very creative research. As soon as we do something that competes directly with our colleagues in the USA or in Europe, who are often building directly on earlier research, we’re going to lose nine times out of ten because we simply do not have the structure yet to be fast and efficient. But in an interesting twist, if you decide to go for different subjects or if you try to think ahead ten to fifteen years then you’re not worried about what’s being done now. You have a niche. This gives Latin American researchers the opportunity to be bold and to create something original.

An interview with Angela Nieto

Eva Amsen — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:53:48 +0000

(This interview originally appeared in Development.)

Angela Nieto is Full Professor at the Instituto de Neurociencias (CSIC-UMH) in Alicante, Spain, and Head of the institute’s Developmental Neurobiology Unit. She is also the current president of the Spanish Society for Developmental Biology (Sociedad Española de Biología del Desarollo, SEBD). We interviewed her to talk about the plans of the SEBD for the coming years.

What research topics are you working on?

We have been working on the mechanisms that drive cell movements early in development. More than 20 years ago we started to work on the Snail family of transcription factors and found that, in vertebrates, Snail factors are very important for the triggering of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in the embryo. Therefore, Snail factors are necessary for cell delamination at the primitive streak and at the neural crest, as well as in other tissues. Essentially, the EMT has kept us very busy for many years now. Over the years we have extended our analysis to not only study the EMT during embryonic development, but also in pathology – particularly in tumour progression and in other diseases that involve the EMT. We also extended our research into the role of Snail to EMT-independent processes, such as bone growth and homeostasis, and started investigating some other EMT inducers.

You’re the president of the Spanish Society for Developmental Biology. How long have you held this position?

I’ve been president for a year now, and it has been quite a busy year, because we are revitalizing the society at the moment. For example, we have written new statutes to accommodate the society to new regulations.

How was the SEBD originally formed?

The society was initiated in 1994, in association with the International Journal of Developmental Biology (IJDB). Juan Aréchaga, of the University of the Basque Country, is the Editor in Chief of the IJDB and put a lot of effort into the journal. At the same time it was important to have Antonio Garcia-Bellido, one of the main figures in developmental biology in Spain, working together with Juan Aréchaga to create the society. At the moment, the links with the journal are still tight, but the society has become more independent.

How often does the SEBD organize meetings for its members?

The first meeting was held in 1996, in Bilbao. From then on we’ve had meetings every 2 years, and we will continue to do that. We’re also interested in interacting more with other developmental biology societies, so we often organize joint meetings. We have done this already with the British, Portuguese and French societies for developmental biology, and at our next meeting in November – again held in association with the Portuguese society – we will have the North American Society for Developmental Biology as an invited guest. We are very close to the Portuguese society and have plans for a long-term association, so that we can perhaps have meetings every year: one year in Spain and the next year in Portugal.

What would you like to see the society achieve in the near future?

We want to promote the various activities of the society. Notably, we are trying to increase the interactions among the members and strengthen our ties with other European societies. But at the same time we have two additional aims. One is to encourage young scientists to be interested in developmental biology. The second is to increase the visibility of the SEBD and of scientific research in general to Spanish society. In Spain, there is not much of a tradition of explaining science to lay people. However, we know that people in Spain are extremely interested in science and scientists. To give you an idea, some recent statistics showed that when you ask laypeople their opinion on different professions, scientists come out very high. The Spanish public really appreciates what scientists do and they trust scientists very much. This is very nice, and it serves as a strong message that we have to communicate the research we do, and that we should be able to provide the public with an informed opinion on several issues related to developmental biology, including those linked to bioethical issues. As a scientific society, we may have to work together with the mass media. That is something that I think hasn’t been done properly in the past, but which the public is actually asking us to do.

What are the current challenges for researchers in Spain?

Undoubtedly, one of the challenges is the economic crisis, which not only affects Spanish science, but also science in the rest of Europe and all over the world. At the start of this year, we received bad news, as the Ministry of Science and Innovation has been discontinued, and investment in research and development will be reduced in Spain, which is very disappointing. Securing funds for research may also be related to scientific outreach and keeping the public informed: if society believes that investing in research is crucial, then it will be easier to convince politicians that research should be protected and that cutting down the budget for science means cutting down our progress and our future.

How can Spanish developmental biologists play a role in this?

It is now easier than ever to promote translational research and, as developmental biologists, many of us have connections with biomedicine. But we have to firmly support investment in basic research. We have to convey the message to the public that we really need to know the physiology of the biological processes before we can design intelligent strategies for therapies.

Does the SEBD have any concrete plans for providing public outreach?

In this first year of the new society committee we’ve been busy trying to generate all the instruments that we actually need to carry out our activities. We have a new webpage (www.sebd.es) and we’re preparing a lot of different activities to promote visibility and interactions – those will be launched this year. We would like to promote not just developmental biology but scientific research in general. Not only at universities, to try to attract PhD students, but also by going to schools to show kids how much fun it is to work in science. Scientific research takes a lot of effort, and although sometimes it’s disappointing because experiments don’t always work, it is very exciting and it is always different. That is the message we hope to pass on during school visits: science is fun and, very importantly, essential for our future.

Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist

Nishal Patel — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:03:53 +0000

I recently saw a documentary about graduate students called Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist (available to watch here). It’s hour long movie follows several PhD students from Lawrence Shapiro’s lab in Columbia, NY, for 3 years as they attempt to crystallise and work out the structure of AMPK, a cellular master regulator involved in several metabolic pathways such as glucose regulation and lipogenesis.

The three PhD students the film focuses on are Rob (below right with Lawrence), Kilpatrick (Kil) and Gabrielle. Rob is given the most screen time. He is a two-time university drop-out and navy veteran on his last chance to get a PhD after being kicked out of another lab for being disruptive. Kil is desperate to finish before he turns 30 and is also under pressure to get a job from his fiancée. Gabrielle is a former technician who’s story isn’t dwelt upon as much as the others and she is seen to be struggling with being an independent researcher.

Lawrence Shapiro comes out as a great mentor, a zen-like father figure ready to offer advice to his students. He sees a PhD as more of an apprenticeship rather than a job (he makes a really nice comparison between scientists and violinists around 12 minutes in).

I always thought a reality show about life in the lab would be a great way to show the public how the world of science works rather than the shiny lab coats and 20 second PCR reactions shown on TV. I’m glad Richard and Carole Rifkind took the initiative to make this. The film is great in that it not only highlights the curiosity that motivates scientists, it also deals with the ups of experiments that worked and the downs of those that failed as well as the ever present threat of being scooped. It’s also really well made, quite funny and easy for the general public to understand, so next time someone asks you what working in a lab is like, show them this movie!

On a more light-hearted note, here are a couple of viral video came out recently that many Node readers might identify with as well – “Sh!t Graduate Students Say” and “Sh!t Scientists Say” - enjoy!

A Career in Science Management

Natascha Bushati — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:42:01 +0000

Last June, Eva summarised the Node’s alternative careers stories, personal accounts of how scientists made their transitions from research into various alternative career paths. As a friend of Andrea Hutterer, who is now the Fellowships Manager at EMBO, I witnessed her exciting leap from the bench into science management back in 2010, and now asked her to tell her story. I’m sure her experiences will interest the Node’s readers and complement the alternative careers stories already available on the site. Enjoy the interview!

Briefly tell us about your scientific career.

I studied biochemistry in Vienna and then did both my diploma thesis and my PhD in Jürgen Knoblich’s lab at IMP and IMBA in Vienna. The focus of my thesis was asymmetric cell division in the nervous system of Drosophila. After that I joined Masanori Mishima’s group at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, UK, for a postdoc. In his lab, I studied the process of cytokinesis.

Why did you quit research?

I was simply not sufficiently fascinated by one particular biological problem. My CV was good in scientific terms, so I think I could have gone ahead and started to apply for PI positions. But without being passionate about a question I think it’s hard to be successful, and being quite ambitious I decided it’s not the right career path for me.

What got you interested in research funding and policy? Did you consider other career paths?

Once I had decided to look into alternative careers, I needed to find out which career paths were open to me. I looked into loads of things - management consulting, scientific editing, medical writing, conference organising and science communication. In the end it was clear that science management was the best choice for me, as I would still have direct contact to scientists and thereby get a broad overview of scientific progress and emerging fields. On top of that, one can make a difference in terms of policy, for example by dealing with researchers’ employment conditions or gender issues.

Did you take any additional courses to polish your CV?

At the Gurdon Institute I was lucky enough to be able to take advantage of the fantastic careers service Cambridge University offers. In the beginning, I almost randomly took courses such as microeconomics, web-authoring and programming languages. This helped in a way that I found out quickly that pure economics were not entirely my thing and Perl was not my language. Other courses were more useful, for example when I learned the basics of using HTML to build websites or how to best write a CV for non-scientific jobs.

With regard to “polishing” my CV, it wasn’t so much the courses I listed but more how I organised the CV. I tried to emphasise my soft skills and highlighted extracurricular activities such as supervising younger students and organising retreats and symposia.

How easy was it to get your first job in funding?

It wasn’t easy at all, not even to get interviews. My scientific CV was good, but I had virtually no other relevant experience. Many employers appreciate even the smallest amount of experience more than a fantastic scientific CV, so what you really need when coming out of a PhD or postdoc is to get a foot in the door.

The first interview I got was with Cancer Research UK, but they didn’t offer me the job. I then got offered a job as Science Manager with the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Swindon, UK. I was quite over-qualified for this job since it didn’t even require a PhD, plus it came with a significant pay cut, but I was glad to have been offered it and accepted. In hindsight, it was the perfect stepping stone.

As preparation for the interviews, the Cambridge Careers Service again proved extremely helpful, because they offered mock interviews with the career advisor. It helped immensely to practise - I found out what I might be asked in an interview and I learned to explore different possibilities for answering these questions. I simply got an idea of what to expect during the process.

What does your work consist of?

On an everyday basis, I do some general administration, the details of which depend on the various fellowship application deadlines: I read proposals, find referees, talk to fellows, talk to my team [Andrea has three administrative staff to manage] and attend in-house management meetings. Every now and then I travel to career events to give talks about the programme, or attend workshops somewhere in Europe, which cover different aspects that come with the programme, such as a recent workshop on tracking research careers.

I also write grant proposals to try to get more money for the programme, and organise and attend the EMBO Fellows’ meetings in Heidelberg and the US. So it’s a very diverse job and I’m never even remotely bored!

Is there anything you miss about working in research?

At the MRC, although my colleagues were great I sometimes missed the international environment, which I do have here at EMBO. Sometimes I also miss standing at the bench, running around in the lab, being physically active. But I’m aware that that would have stopped sooner or later even if I had stayed in research and had become a PI.

What advice do you have for PhD students and postdocs wanting to leave academic research?

Find out why exactly you want to leave and what you would rather do. Even if you’re unclear whether research might be the right thing for you or not, start thinking about alternatives and get involved in non-scientific activities early on. There’s actually quite a lot one can do with our education. You just need to be clear about your goals, have a good non-scientific CV ready and work towards the new career profile. It might take a while until you get the job you have in mind, and you possibly need to be prepared to take pay cuts and will maybe feel slightly under-challenged in your first non-research job, but at least for me it was all worth it.

Bio Web Conferences – Critical discussions with developmental biologists for deep learning.

Michael Barresi — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:20:19 +0000

Dear Developmental biology community,

I would like to bring to your attention a potentially valuable resource for your teaching and research endeavors. I am a neurodevelopmental biologist at Smith College. I started teaching a course in Developmental Biology back in 2005, and since then have been utilizing web conferencing technology to bring the research behind concepts alive in the classroom. My students have been interacting with leading scientists in the field of developmental biology holding organized Q&A video conferences focused on current and seminal research articles. I am posting this to the Node as since I started using this pedagogical approach I have been recording these discussions, and with full consent provided, I have established an online repository of these recordings via my lab website. I have each conference (40 now and growing) organized by topic for ease of searching, and each individual session is further broken down by specific question to facilitate quick access to your greatest interest.

Because these sessions are based on key research papers they are extremely applicable for any teacher or student to use in their own courses as supplemental resources to what is probably the very same topics being covered. For instance, I often assign my students select conferences to watch to supplement their readings or coverage of the material. Moreover, in class I will poise certain questions about a topic to my student and after some discussion, click on say, Dr. Cliff Tabin’s response to the similar question. It provides a new and real perspective to the information that students truly appreciate and fosters long-term retention of the material.

There are also many other positive outcomes to both conducting and watching these conferences. Namely students gain a very different and revealing perspective of not only where a particular field of Dev Bio is moving, but more personal understandings of who the scientists are and how they got to where they are today. Listening to these remarkable scientists articulate their thinking process to address the research question is extremely illuminating to the developing scientist in your classroom.

So I invite and encourage you to check out these discussions as I am disseminating them for your benefit and use. I hope you find them helpful. Feel free to let me know what you think and, if you like them, how you might use them in your teaching.

“Bio Web Conferences” http://sophia.smith.edu/~mbarresi/lab/biowebconferences.html

Best regards,

Michael J.F. Barresi

P.S. additional post on stem cell documentaries coming….

Stem cells, cellules souches, Stammzellen: taking research to Europe’s public

Emma Kemp — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:50:42 +0000

It’s been a busy year for EuroStemCell: Europe’s stem cell hub - see www.eurostemcell.org for more information on who we are. We’d like to wish The Node community a happy festive season and a great start to 2012. But before we say goodbye to 2011, we thought you might be interested to know about some of the things we’ve been doing recently…

EuroStemCell goes multilingual

eurostemcell.org is multilingual! Or tri-lingual, at least.

The EuroStemCell website is now available in 2 additional languages, German and French, with Italian and Spanish coming soon. Just click on the flag icons to the right of any page on the website to give the newly translated interface a whirl.

Read more about our translation project, or go straight to the French or German homepage.

Research updates from EU-funded stem cell projects

Our research updates keep you informed about progress in public-funded European stem cell research. Here’s a recent example from our partner, NeuroStemcell.

Using stem cells to develop new therapies for Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases

NeuroStemcell brings stem cell biology and clinical science together to develop and test new approaches to stem-cell-based therapy. We study Parkinson’s (PD) and Huntington’s (HD) diseases, which are degenerative diseases of the brain.

Read more about NeuroStemcell

Italy meets the UK to discuss the future of stem cells in the clinic

Over 100 Italian and UK scientists and politicians came together on 12 December for a Summit on Regenerative Medicine organized by the Italian Embassy in London and the School of Science Technology and Health, University Campus Suffolk. Their aim: to bring the collective expertise of academics, industry and the political world to bear on the question of how to take basic stem cell research towards the clinic.

We went along to the meeting - read our report on the discussions

Inside the lab

We’ve got two new guest bloggers on our site: Anestis Tsakiridis is sharing his insider’s view of stem cell research in his blogs, Behind the Bench: A series about researchers and their rituals; and we’re delighted to welcome Alzheimer’s researcher Selina Wray, who posted her first blog, A fish out of water, on our site just last week.

Meet the stem cell scientists

We’ve also been busy talking to experts across the stem cell field. Read our interviews with Cedric Blanpain, Yann Barrandon, Christine Mummery, Doug Sipp, Karen English and Nick Barker on the site now and keep your eye out for our chats with Jane Visvader, Connie Eaves and others in the New Year.

Stem cell factsheets

We’ve got an ever-growing set of fact sheets giving quick access to the key facts about different areas of stem cell and regenerative medicine research. The content is written by researchers and reviewed by senior scientists. The fact sheets are designed for non-specialists but why not check them out next time for a quick overview next time someone asks you about something a little outside your own field? Take a look at the whole collection (13 published so far, some in French & German too), but here’s one of our latest…

Type 1 Diabetes: How could stem cells help?

Diabetes is a common life-long condition and the number of children being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes is increasing. The symptoms can be controlled but there is no cure. For many, diabetes means living with daily insulin injections and the possibility of long-term damage to their health. How might stem cells help?Read our factsheet about stem cells and diabetes

Keep up with Europe’s stem cell news

Sign up to our newsletter to stay in touch with all the latest news from the EuroStemCell project. From February 2012 we’ll be sending out a monthly newsletter. For more regular updates, you can follow us on Twitter, check out our Facebook page or subscribe to our RSS feeds. And if you haven’t visited the site for a while, do take a look and get in touch with your feedback and ideas.

PHD Comics on the big screen

Eva Amsen — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:21:34 +0000

The web comic Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD) has been commiserating with graduate students since 1997. And now you can watch the comics come to live on the big screen, as universities and institutes across the world (including Antarctica!) are screening the PHD movie.

Fans of the comic will recognize most of the jokes, but now the individual 3-panel strips have been turned into a full-length movie with a plot that summarizes the main story of the long-running comic. The film was shot in its entirety at the Caltech campus last spring, and all actors are students and staff from Caltech. As they’re by and large professional scientists rather than professional actors, the acting isn’t always very sharp, but they did a great job at bringing the comics to life. The trailer below gives a good indication of the film.

PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Most screenings are only open to students from the hosting institution, but I was lucky to hear about an open screening at University College London. Even though the screening was open to absolutely everyone, the lecture theatre was not entirely full. Perhaps it really does appeal specifically to grad students? Nevertheless, the people who did attend seemed to enjoy the film, and laughed at every joke. Even the ones that you could see coming from a mile away if you were familiar with the comics.

But this was not just any screening: it was one of the few that PHD Comics creator Jorge Cham was attending. After the film, science-loving comedian Robin Ince hosted a Q&A with Jorge and with Alex Lockwood - the actress (and graduate student!) who plays the character of Cecilia in the film. Alex initially kept her role in the film a secret from her advisor. “I didn’t tell him I was doing it for a while, but his wife is really nosy on Facebook…” Once he found out, he was a lot more excited about the film than she was – as long as she still got her work done, of course.

Despite being based largely on the existing comic strips, the end of the film breaks a longstanding tradition. In the fourteen years that Piled Higher and Deeper has been running, the main character was never named. In the film, he finally introduces himself. When this came up during the Q&A, Jorge explained why the student didn’t have a name to begin with: “First I was just kind of lazy, but then it became a funny thing. It took my own professor about four years until he learned my name.” But now, wanting to give the film a more interesting resolution, the student gets a name. “I figured it was about time. And I can always deny that it’s not comic-canon, that it’s just movie-canon…”

After the Q&A, we caught up with Jorge and asked him how the film translates to international audiences. It’s set in the US, where PhD degrees can regularly take 5-7 years, and many jokes are based on the fact that graduate school takes forever. My own favourite joke involves Cecilia’s encounter with a high school classmate:

But in the UK, where several universities have now screened the film, PhD degrees are much shorter than in North America. Do the jokes hold up?

“Well I heard that the guitarist from Queen took 35 years to finish his PhD, so I think he pulls up the average,” jokes Jorge, “But I think what translates the most is that feeling of uncertainty, feeling stuck and not being quite sure what you’re going to do next. That’s international.”

Regular readers of the Node may recall that we’ve interviewed Jorge before, and that he mentioned a “biologist character” that would appear in the comic very soon. What is happening with that, we wanted to know. “That’s still coming, but probably not for another year, at least.” Aww. But of course, this is the man who has turned procrastination into a career: Jorge left research several years ago to pursue the comic full time, and to give talks about procrastination to graduate students. To tie in with the various posts we’ve had on the Node about alternative careers, we asked him what he learned in his PhD degree that he still uses today.

“Many things. I think part of what I do as an artist is trying to discover where the truth is - or at least ask the question “where is the truth?” - and being able to think analytically in a big picture sense but also being able to drill down, and work on the minutiae of the details. I think the PhD gives you that kind of macro/micro vision at the same time. But mostly it just gives me the ability to avoid questions…”

If you’d like to see the movie yourself, here is a list of places that are showing it. And if you’re a bit more patient (now there’s something you learn in grad school!) you can wait for the DVD release, tentatively planned for Pi Day (March 14) next year.

An Interview With Ottoline Leyser

Eva Amsen — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:05:48 +0000

(This interview originally appeared in Development.)

The Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge is a new research institute that aims to achieve an integrated understanding of plant development. Its Associate Director is the new plant Editor of Development, Ottoline Leyser, who is also Professor of Plant Development at the University of Cambridge. We recently caught up with Professor Leyser and asked her about the Sainsbury Laboratory and about her own research interests.

When did you first become interested in plant development?

To me, plant development has always been much more interesting than animal development, because of its plasticity. In plants, the body plan is incredibly flexible: one genotype can occupy an extraordinary range of phenotype space. I’ve always thought that was just amazing.

I did my undergraduate degree here in Cambridge, in the Genetics Department, not in plant science. We had this absolutely fantastic interdepartmental development course that was taught by John Gurdon, Peter Lawrence and many other wonderful people. It was very striking, the contrast between what was happening in animal development, which was being transformed by Drosophila genetics, by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Eric Wieschaus and others, and what was happening in plants: despite the long tradition of genetics in plants, developmental genetics somehow hadn’t really taken off. But in the final year of my undergraduate degree, there were the first hints of Arabidopsis as a model organism, driven at least in part by Elliot Meyerowitz, who is now the inaugural director here at the Sainsbury Laboratory. So, there was suddenly a very exciting opportunity to push things ahead in plant development using developmental genetics. I started looking for a PhD position in an Arabidopsis lab and, fortunately for me, Ian Furner had just arrived back from the USA clutching some Arabidopsis seed in a tube, so I stayed in Cambridge and did my PhD with him, studying meristem mutants in Arabidopsis.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on the role of plant hormones in integration of the endogenous and environmental signals that control the plant body plan. We’re looking principally at shoot branching control and are trying to understand how every individual axillary bud on the plant makes a decision about whether to activate or not, depending on multiple inputs. It’s really a question of signal integration.

You’ve recently moved your lab from York to Cambridge to set up the new Sainsbury Laboratory. How did the lab move go?

It’s still an ongoing process. We’re pioneers down here, who have had to deal with a very fabulous but nonetheless brand new and, at the time, unfinished building. But now that the first results from experiments carried out in the new lab are coming in it’s very exciting. Meanwhile, there’s still a core of people in York, partly because some people didn’t want to move and partly because we’re in the middle of a rather long-term ten-generation Arabidopsis experiment, which I didn’t want to move.

How and why was the Sainsbury Laboratory formed?

The Sainsbury Laboratory is funded by the Gatsby foundation, which is a charity of the Sainsbury family. They have a series of charities that reflect the interests of members of the family and plant science is a particular interest of David Sainsbury. Within plant science, his main focus has been on plant pathology and plant developmental biology. There’s an existing Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich that focuses on plant pathology, so we represent the other side of his interests.

I think those interests reflect a humanitarian side, because plant pathology and plant developmental biology are at the root of crop productivity. Everybody is increasingly aware of the requirements for sustainable and secure food supplies. You can very plausibly make an argument that inadequate food supply kills more people than cancer, but the amount of funding going into plant science research is quite low compared with the funding that cancer research receives. One of the things this institute does is put a flag in the ground for the extraordinary importance of plant sciences. It’s a very iconic building in a very public location in the Botanic Gardens at Cambridge University and this public, visible location seems to say that plant biology is really important, which it is.

When was the building officially opened?

It was officially opened at the end of April, by her majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who was the Chancellor of Cambridge University until June 2011. They were here for almost an hour and it was exciting. They were surprisingly engaged with the experiments. We showed them a number of examples of the sort of work we’re doing and they asked sensible questions. I think most of us felt that it’s excellent for plant science to have something this high profile going on.

How many labs will the institute host?

We’re planning to have around 12 group leaders, each with a group size of about 10 people. We’ll have group size limits – we’re not going for enormous expanding labs, because we want to create a collaborative, integrated research environment. If you have a huge group it tends to fragment things. So, the building is designed for about 120 scientists, with an additional 30 or so support staff.

What will be the main focus of the research at the Sainsbury Laboratory?

The institute is focused on plant developmental biology, with a particular interest in computational modelling. I think there’s a feeling that development in general, and certainly plant development, has got to the point at which it needs rigorous computational models to allow us to understand the regulatory networks that underlie development. Once you’ve got a sufficient understanding of the components in a system, and know that there is a lot of feedback regulation, it becomes incredibly difficult to make sensible predictive experimental plans without a computational model. We’re hoping to set up something here that, from the beginning, stimulates integration of computational approaches and wet experiments.

Are there any questions in particular that computational modelling has already answered in plants, or will answer soon?

There are lots of very good examples of computational modelling providing insights that would’ve been hard to get from the sort of classical, ‘back-of-an-envelope’ approach that people used before. There are several good models of phylotactic patterning, which is the system that produces the patterns in which leaves emerge from the meristem, that have been very helpful. There are also very good models of the circadian clock. Computational modelling is now a widely adopted approach in systems that are sufficiently well understood.

You’re also the new plant editor of Development. What role does the journal play in the field of plant development?

I think Development holds a very special place in the plant community. The developmental biology community has been more welcoming to plant science than some other communities. One reason for this is that development has quite unifying underlying concepts, which you can transfer very easily between systems. This means that you can have interesting and engaged discussions with people who work on completely different models – both in terms of organism and developmental system – because everybody understands terms such as ‘determination’ or ‘commitment’. So Development is the place to go for plant biologists whose work contributes to the understanding of universal developmental mechanisms in a way that is interesting to the whole developmental biology community.

Is there any particular type of plant research that you’d like to see published inDevelopment?

I think that the key qualities of a paper in Development relate to fundamental issues of developmental mechanisms, and understanding the solutions to basic problems in development. That’s what I’d like to maintain. I’m less interested in descriptive studies of the functions of individual genes, and more interested in analytical studies of regulatory processes that explain the emergence of higher order properties in a developmental system. That’s the key issue: to understand such genotype-phenotype connectivity.

What do you do when you’re not doing research?

That’s actually quite an interesting question at this phase in my life, because until now I’ve always said “spend time with my family”, but one thing that made this move to Cambridge possible, apart from the tremendous excitement of setting up a new institute, was the fact that my youngest child has just left home to start university. But, we bought a house with a huge garden, so we’re going to be growing lots of fruit and vegetables.

You’ve written a book called ‘Mothers in Science’, about combining parenting with research. Is there any advice in particular that you would like to pass on to women who are thinking of combining research and family?

I put the book together because I was so frustrated with the prevailing pessimism that is endemic in science in general: that everything is so difficult and that anything you do that is a bit unusual immediately puts a black mark against you. Having children has somehow got itself included in that list of things that are impossible in a research career. And it’s just not true. If you look around there are many, many people who have successfully combined those things. I sometimes say that it’s perfectly possible to combine a career in science with children, because men have been doing it for centuries. I do think that is an important point. The part where you’re actually giving birth is a relatively short part of the process. The real issue is managing your flexibility of time for the next 20 years, and that’s not a gender issue – it’s a parent issue. It breaks your heart to see people who are excited about research and keen to pursue that as a career choosing other things because they think it’s going to be too difficult or that it’s going to restrict what else they can do. In many ways, academia is much more flexible as a career than a lot of other jobs.