Advancing the Field of Developmental Biology

A cold wind whipped off Lake Mendota, and the sting of the season’s first snow flurries greeted a crowd of developmental biologists descending upon the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus on a Friday afternoon in mid-November. The inclement weather might have been cause for panic or delay in other regions of the country, but not here. This was the 2022 Midwest Regional Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology.

Over the past six months, I have been involved in not one, but two, intensive developmental biology research courses.  Each was a wonderful experience and watching how the courses impacted the students made me reflect on how transformative a rather similar course, one that I took nearly 30 years ago, was to my own scientific career.  Here, I share my thoughts on what it is about such courses that make them such beneficial and rewarding experiences for students (whether young or not so young) of developmental biology.