By James Briscoe

It’s 10 pm on a Saturday night as I write this and I’m on a flight from London to Boston. I’m heading to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts where I will be spending the week teaching on an advanced study course, aimed at graduate students and post-docs in my field. I’ve participated in this course for the last five or so years and it’s something I’ve grown to look forward to every year [Gene Regulatory Networks for Development]. In part this is because I always find it stimulating and inspiring experience. Like all courses at Woods Hole it’s intense, the participants are always engaged and committed, they will pull all-nighters to work on their projects and then still want to ask questions and discuss details when you lecture the following morning.

On top of this, the other faculty who teach on the course are leaders in the field and spending a week with them catching up, discussing science, exchanging ideas is both motivating and enormously enjoyable. There’s something about the face to face social time that produces open discussion and leads to new ideas. The environment of Woods Hole is particularly good at encouraging this: we all stay in the same halls, eat together and spend most of our waking hours in each-others company. Read more …