More than Just Meetings - Xenopus, Advanced Imaging Workshop

It's probably true that most academic science events are conferences, developing our knowledge and understandng by sharing work through presentations, posters and the all important coffee breaks. However, other types of events can be even more enlightening and offer new opportunities to get to meet different types of people. Gary went to Woods Hole to learn more about different ways to image frogs and has been reflecting on what you can gain from workshops that you don't get from conferences.

Name: Gary McDowell

Date: November 16th-22nd 2013

Location: Marine Biological Laboratory, Wood's Hole, MA, USA

Website: http://www.mbl.edu/bell/2013/10/23/advanced-imaging-workshop-xenopus/

At a workshop, everyone's work typically has some common strand, but widely divergent research foci to which they want to apply the same technique. This was particularly the case at the Xenopus imaging workshop, held at the National Xenopus Resource at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Wood's Hole, MA from November 17^th - 22^nd. The workshop was attended by a wide range of frog researchers all looking to use microscopy for many different applications. This ranged from researchers looking at oocytes, through to a surprising number looking at cardiac development at late tadpole stages. Some wished to dissect tissues for high resolution imaging and others looked to image whole embryos. There were also examples of both live imaging and of fixed sample imaging used for in situ hybridisation.

What is so interesting about a workshop compared to a conference? Two things come to mind:

1) Even though people are working on very different things, everyone is looking to use a similar set of techniques geared towards their own individual needs;

2) Because you are spending the day doing practical things, you are often able to look directly at someone else's research as it happens and have discussions about what they are doing, whilst looking at actual samples. You can also spend a long time on this, not just a few minutes in a poster session.

Because of this, the interaction is intellectually stimulating in a very different way to a conference because you get to meet people that you may not usually interact with at a conference, since at first sight, your research interests may not appear to overlap. This leads to a much more open-minded and innovative, "blue skies" approach to discussing research interests.

After spending all day at the bench, people are also much more keen to down tools at the end of the day and unwind at the pub (which, after many years in Cambridge, UK, is my favourite place to work on my science).

The course was very free in structure, which meant people with their own projects had time to prepare samples, whilst those with no agenda could try to learn how to use the microscopes and just play around with things. I was in the best of both worlds, with a few samples I had brought to play around with but with no set pressures or particular goals to achieve whilst there. I also turned up with the impossibly unrealistic idea of imaging all stages of frog development that were being covered by the course, especially live imaging the earliest stages of the fertilized egg (a famously challenging task when using conventional light microscopy, but I was already aware of this and just wanted to bemuse people/test their willingness to suspend their disbelief).

Accepting that my goals were mostly unrealistic meant that I was able to just chat to everyone about what they were doing and probe them about various aspects of their work - again, this is my favourite pastime from my PhD days, to talk to other scientists about their work and swap perspectives.

At a workshop, you also get to pick the brains of the people teaching the course and direct their expertise towards your own problems. We were lucky to have a number of experts at the course: from the University of Southern California, Scott Fraser; from the University of Texas at Austin, John Wallingford, his graduate student Eric Brooks and postdoc Asako Shindo; and from the University of Pittsburgh, Lance Davidson and his graduate student Jo Shawky. With such a high teacher:student ratio, there was a lot of opportunity to get time with each of the instructors and this leads me to a particular point about workshops; unlike a conference, where you simply turn up and information is given to you, at a workshop not only do you want to learn the general principles that are talked about, but you also have to push yourself to get what you need out of the course and make sure that you get the attention of the teachers. It's very easy to miss many prime examples to advance your own work at a workshop unless you actively search them out. For those of us who are more backward about coming forward (after 2½ years in the US, I'm getting better at suppressing my British self-suppression), this can be a stressful endeavour; but if the teaching environment is right, everyone is put at their ease and can approach each other more easily for advice and information.

In addition to the showcasing of developed scientific stories, we also had the opportunity to showcase our own work each day, with an evening show-and-tell of everyone's best images from the workshop. Not only did we get the opportunity to see what everyone else was working on - we were able to critique the work of others and reflect on our own investigations, to figure out how to improve the imaging techniques for future use.

My favourite activity of conferences or workshops will always be, the opportunity to talk science with each other at the pub. You're exhausted after a day of practical work, but not in the same way as at the end of a day of conference presentations; after spending 2 hours zooming in and out and adjusting light levels and contrasts, having an intellectual chat comes much more easily than after being bombarded with (albeit exciting) scientific information all day.

Of course, one of the other benefits of workshops are the T-shirts (see picture - see if you can guess what it says).

(Image of Xenopus laevis provided by H. Krisp via wikimedia commons. Image of 'hidden message' t-shirt provided by the author, not to be reproduced without permission).