Welcome Message from SDB President Helen McNeill

10/15/2026

I am truly honored to serve as the president of the Society for Developmental Biology. My primary responsibility as president is to organize the SDB annual meeting next year, and I am filled with enthusiasm for our community after the great SDB 2026 meeting in Las Vegas.

Next year's meeting will be held in St. Louis, Missouri, at Union Station Hotel, July 17-21. It is a great location and is in a historic setting. I am aided by a great organizing committee with expertise in a wide range of organisms and approaches (Sharon Amacher, David Bilder, Michael Buszczak, Andrea Eveland, Aaron Johnson, Celina Juliano) and by a fantastic group of local organizers (Duygu Özpolat, Laurence Lemaire, Mayssa Mokalled and Les Sutton). Building a strong community is important, and the annual meeting is a great opportunity to share our discoveries and support each other. We look forward to seeing you next year in St. Louis!

While this is a time of great advances in developmental biology and of science in general, we are also faced with great challenges, amongst them looms large the uncertainty in science funding.  Also, there are dramatic changes that are proposed to the grant review system, and I recently sent an email encouraging everyone to submit their response to the proposed changes in the grant review process at NIH.  Please comment and make your voice heard.

These challenges are real, but we must remember that we all have faced challenges in our journey in life and in science, and I thought I would share some of mine here. I was very unmotivated in high school. After graduating with very mediocre grades, unsure what to do next, I went to Ireland and worked in a countryside department store for a year. I had a great time, but I also realized that I wanted to go to university. Attending college as a non-national in Ireland was extremely expensive. So, I returned to the U.S. and started college at a local school in New Jersey (Ramapo College), where I commuted to school from home each day, and worked at a store to pay for my tuition.

I began Ramapo as a history major, then I became a psychology major, then a philosophy major. I loved them all. But, in my third year of college, I took a required “Science for non-science majors” course and was hooked. I switched my major to biology and never looked back.

Ramapo was a small college with little or no research experiences available. I worked in the bio lab helping to set up for lab classes to get money for school, as my parents did not have money to pay for education. After graduating, I worked for a year in a research lab at New York Medical College to get money and lab experience.

The next year, I started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. After several great rotations, I decided to join the lab of James Nelson. Six months later he decided to move to Stanford! After a lot of discussions with my husband, we decided to move to California with him. Grad school was exciting and we loved California.  

For my postdoc I stayed at Stanford, but switched fields from mammalian cell biology to Drosophila development. I started my postdoc with high enthusiasm. But just weeks after starting I began to feel very ill and discovered I was pregnant. I had a very rough pregnancy, with extreme nausea and was hospitalized several times. I was unable to work for months. And just as I was getting better, I discovered that my proposed project was scooped (by several publications in Nature) and was left with no project for my postdoc and caring for an infant. It did not look very hopeful. Money was tight, and we juggled work and childcare. I searched for a new postdoc project and started to study a new gene called mirror that I discovered regulated planar cell polarity, a relatively understudied field at the time.

Since then, I have followed my love for developmental biology across the world, with my first lab in London, England, my second lab in Toronto, Canada, and now at Washington University in St. Louis. Over the years I have explored growth control, and patterning, fertility, and mechanotransduction, eye development, kidney development, and oocyte development (to name a few). My lab has used Drosophila, hydra and mouse models to investigate these problems, and each time I am amazed by the strengths of the different organisms and the beauty of developmental biology.

I look forward to seeing the amazing breadth and the beauty of your science at the next SDB meeting in July 2027.

Last Updated 10/15/2026