Locavore science meetings

In many ways, this meeting was like any other: one audience member worked on his laptop the whole time, someone forgot to turn off their cell phone, and there were the inevitable PowerPoint issues. But for all its normality, the New York Area Drosophila Discussion Group, which met at the New York Academy of Sciences on a recent Monday evening (June 15), was unique in several ways. For one thing, all the attendees were from New York City research institutions. For another, they were all fly researchers. When one of the presenters started describing the different larval stages she studied, no one asked her to clarify -- they knew. "It's great because we all speak fly," says Mary Baylies, a Drosophila researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who helped organize the meeting.

Image: Wikimedia

Of course, topical meetings are ubiquitous and important, but as those meetings become increasingly focused on narrow subjects, there is a growing need for broader organism-specific meetings, which can help researchers learn about new techniques and make cross-disciplinary connections they might not make otherwise, say Baylies and other organism meeting devotees. This seems especially true for researchers who work with non-rodent model organisms -- such as worms, flies, yeast and zebrafish -- and are often in the minority at their institutions. There are large national and international organism meetings for these researchers to attend, but those meetings usually occur only annually, or biannually, as is the case with the international C. elegans meeting. Monthly or semi-annual locally-focused organism meetings can help fill in the gaps and give postdocs and graduate students the opportunity to present their work to top researchers in their immediate vicinity.

"We have some of the premier yeast researchers in the Bay Area, but at a larger meeting, you might not get the chance to talk to them," says Allyson O'Donnell, a postdoc at Stanford who recently became involved with the Bay Area Yeast and Other Fungi Symposium. "The local meeting gives postdocs and students the opportunity to talk about their science with these researchers in a smaller setting." Local organism meetings are also good for forming collaborations and sometimes even exchanging lab supplies, says E. Jane Hubbard, a C. elegans researcher at New York University's Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine and co-organizer of the New York Area Worm Meeting. "I've seen people open up their purses and exchange worm samples," she says.

The format at local organism meetings varies. For example, the Bay Area yeast gathering consists of an entire day of presentations and poster sessions, while the New York worm and fly meetings, both hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences, are held in the evening and end with catered receptions. Turnout at the different meetings tends to vary, too. There were about 60 people at last week's Drosophila meeting, but the organizers say more than 100 showed up for the January meeting. About 20 to 40 people typically come to the monthly Boston Area Yeast Meeting, says Dawn Thompson, a senior researcher at the Broad Institute and regular BAYM attendee.

Keeping the groups going can be difficult -- the Bay Area yeast group recently came back from an eight year hiatus -- but Baylies says it's worth the effort. She even helps run a hyperlocalized version of the New York area fly meeting for Drosophila researchers working at Upper East Side institutions. To researchers who live in areas where there are no local organism-specific groups, she suggests they start their own. "You can do this," she says.


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