For MBL Course Directors, It’s a Labor of Love
“Other things being equal, the investigator is always the best instructor,” wrote Charles O. Whitman, founding director of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in 1888, describing his vision for a seaside lab integrating research and education.
And since then, students in the MBL’s Advanced Research Training Courses (ARTC) have benefited from faculty who aren’t just good teachers, but also outstanding investigators in the biological sciences. Immersed in contemporary research with top-notch mentors, the trainees make discoveries and establish connections that can transform their careers and, often, their lives.
The scientists who serve as ARTC course directors do so for many reasons, but it is always a labor of love. For two to eight weeks, they bond in an intense, unforgettable experience with the other course participants, exploring, testing, failing and succeeding together as they attempt new and creative experiments with highly advanced instruments. The course directors explore topics with trainees that their own research has helped to define, and they lure an impressive roster of other respected scientists to Woods Hole to serve as course faculty or lecturers.
This year, MBL welcomed six new ARTC course directors, most of whom signed up for a five-year term. All have prior experience with ARTCs, including as students, and all share a dedication to fostering curiosity, imagination, and technical skill among the next generation of researchers.
Clifford Brangwynne, Princeton University
Cliff Brangwynne was a student in the 2006 Physiology course and had returned as a teaching assistant in 2008 when he and others made a startling observation that would overturn long-held conceptions about how cells organize and essentially function. So, when Brangwynne was invited to co-direct the Physiology course with Amy Gladfelter, “I basically couldn’t say no,” he says. The Physiology course is, he says, “a deep, immersive dive into cutting-edge science with brilliant, creative students and faculty. One minute you’re in this deep, immersive conversation about microscopy and optics, and the next you’re absorbed in a discussion about the biology of the cell surface, or evolution. … People are banging down the door to try and get involved in the course. There is nothing like it in the world.”
Brangwynne is directing a new bioengineering institute and PhD program at Princeton, and he brings that translational orientation to the Physiology course. “We talk a lot about developing technologies to enable basic research, with the goal of making important discoveries, and how that translates to broader impacts such as development of therapeutics,” he says. “We keep an eye on fundamental problems that cannot be solved with current technologies and think about developing new ones or adapting older technologies to address these problems.”
And it goes both ways. “We are learning lessons in Physiology that we’re bringing back to Princeton,” he says. “In a very concrete way, the course is helping guide how the new bioengineering program is being built.”
Amy Gladfelter, Duke University
Amy Gladfelter’s career has long been intertwined with the MBL. She first attended the Physiology course as a student in 1998, where she conducted an independent project on an early-stage fruit fly embryo in which a single cell contains many nuclei. These giant cells, known as syncytia, became a focus of her research program for the rest of her career. A quantitative cell biologist, she now uses microscopy, biophysical, and genetic approaches to study the functions that emerge from this unconventional cellular organization. And the mechanisms she investigates, such as how these cells control gene transcription or sense their own shape, are broadly relevant.
“My research program is curiosity driven and I am not afraid to take on risks and move into new disciplines. I bring this sense of curiosity and risk-taking to the Physiology course,” Gladfelter says. “The impact of the Physiology course radiates across our field in ways that change the kind of questions that are asked, and approaches that are taken.”
Tatjana Piotrowski, Stowers Institute
When Tatjana Piotrowski was a student in the Embryology course in 1995, she didn’t imagine she would one day become the course’s co-director. Nor did she ever forget the experience. “This course often changes career paths,” Piotrowski says. "Students are exposed to new research organisms and techniques that shape their future research projects and often their career trajectory."
The course introduces students to the developmental programs of a wide array of organisms, from established models such as fruit flies, zebrafish and chickens to emerging marine invertebrate models such as cnidarians, ctenophores, corals and cephalopods. Piotrowski’s lab at the Stowers Institute embraces a variety of organisms to explore sensory organ development and regeneration, and she has taught in the Embryology course’s zebrafish module since 2012.
“I hope to embolden students to tackle difficult questions and to provide them with the tools that allow them to identify research organisms best suited to address these questions," Piotrowski says. “The study of developmental biology and embryology is crucial to our understanding of how life works and, ultimately, is making a significant impact on human health. We’re in a special time for this field. Students have many new tools and cutting-edge technologies available to them, allowing them to make fundamental discoveries much faster.”
Methods in Computational Neuroscience Course
Stefano Fusi, Columbia University
Fusi, who has lectured in Methods in Computational Neuroscience (MCN) since 2017, believes the field needs the course now more than ever to embrace a more interdisciplinary approach and the rapid advancements driven by artificial intelligence. “The MCN course is widely regarded as the best course in the field, and it is not surprising that it formed some of the leading experimental and theoretical neuroscientists,” he says.
Fusi’s research has helped drive the realization that focusing on individual neurons would not yield insight on the fundamental computations underlying most brain operations. Instead of responding to only one variable relevant to a task, a neuron responds to multiple, exhibiting what he and colleagues in 2013 called “mixed selectivity.” They have since introduced a new conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the neural code by studying neural activity at the level of populations of cells.
“As a theorist, I have worked with experimentalists for my entire career, and I know the challenges of finding a common language to communicate and collaborate efficiently,” Fusi says. This course provides a meeting ground for both.
Roozbeh Kiani, New York University
Kiani, a systems neuroscientist, first experienced this course as a lecturer in 2009. On the first afternoon, he learned a valuable method for statistical analysis from another lecturer. Other conversations led him to uncover an oversight in a newly published, high-profile paper, and the insight to revise an experimental approach. Subsequent visits were equally enriching for Kiani, who studies the neural mechanisms underlying decision-making. His group examines this by manipulating neural responses while subjects engage in decision-making tasks, such as stimulating or inactivating small clusters of neurons. He complements these experimental approaches with behavioral and computational studies.
Kiani finds his interactions with students energizing. “There's nothing more potent for crystallizing a concept than trying to teach it, and nothing more stimulating than a thoughtful question from one of my students,” he says.
“MCN is a unique course that's unquestionably worth every effort to sustain and enhance,” Kiani adds. “MCN has been a cornerstone of neuroscience education, nurturing countless top-tier theoreticians and systems neuroscientists over the past decades."
Tracy Heath, Iowa State University
As a doctoral student in the Molecular Evolution workshop in 2007, Heath learned to work with molecular data and populations while enhancing her understanding of statistical phylogenetics (evolutionary relationships among organisms). The experience, she says “was transformative for my career.” Evolutionary biologists she met at MBL have since become collaborators, colleagues, advocates, and friends.
Heath now develops statistical methods to estimate evolutionary relationships among species and infectious pathogens. Analyses like these are critical for understanding and addressing climate change, vanishing biodiversity, pandemics, and other urgent issues, but the methods used to carry them out are difficult to adopt. The Molecular Evolution workshop fills this need by providing biologists with the necessary training, both in theory and application. In addition, it supports her work developing new methods.
“Workshops like this are where we learn about the needs of scientists using tools we develop, giving us the insight to make [the tools] better and more relevant,” Heath says.
John Spear, Colorado School of Mines
When Spear was a student in the Microbial Diversity course in 1998, it opened his mind to new possibilities within the microbial world. He subsequently altered his doctoral research to include molecular microbial ecology. Spear now has 25 years’ experience in field work in 20 different countries. His research in Yellowstone National Park has shown, for example, that hydrogen likely fuels most hot-spring dwelling microbes and he documented a shift in their carbon metabolism in response to climate change. “We are only a part of a biogeochemical planet, and to better understand the Earth is to better understand ourselves,” Spear says.
Spear returned to the Microbial Diversity course as co-director this year because he values the energy the students and MBL staff bring and the experiences — learning intensely in the field and from one another — that they share.
“It is a remarkable thing to be a part of,” Spear says. Afterward, “we all go forward, students and faculty, to our home institutions with new ideas, new tools, new ways of doing science and new ways of working on complex topics in the microbial world.”