Neural Circuit Meeting at CSHL, and a trip to Albert einstein to boot.

During the last week of March, I made a trip to the good ol’ U.S.A. to attend the Neuronal Circuits meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory out on Long Island. There, I presented a talk entitled “Comparative Graph Theoretical Analysis of Networks of Identified Neurons.” During the talk, I summarized the Pristionchus connectivity project as well as introduced some of the graph theory methods I’ve been working on for asking questions of connectivity networks. For me, the meeting was outstanding. All of the talks were well presented and of a very high standard… you can count on your mind being blown at least a couple of times a day at these meetings! CSHL is an excellent (though expensive) venue for meetings, and the  meeting itself was structured to allow plenty of time to talk with people. There weren’t so many worm people there, but Scott Emmons presented his connectivity dataset for the male in C. elegans, Julie Cho from Paul Sternberg’s lab presented a nice talk on her work dealing with lethargic (“sleep”) and a couple of awesome grad students from Mark Alkema’s lab had posters (Christopher Clark and Jennifer Pirri). They look at locomotion circuits, including examining how C. elegans avoids nematode trapping fungi. I’ve always been a fan of Arthrobotrys! Prior to the meeting, I went out to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx to visit the labs of David Hall and Scott Emmons. Their work on the male tail is impressive, available already online (www.wormatlas.org) and should be published this year. I always like visiting David’s lab because it is kind of an electron microscopy museum, containing many of the early and important electron micrographs for C. elegans. This time around, there was a new addition: the original wooden models constructed by, I think, John White in order to investigate vulva development! Apparently, Dave saved them from being discarded. Dave is also an Avid birder and an active conservationist, so in between lab visits I had a chance to tag along to some of his birding sites. Truly an action packed trip! To see some additional photos, look at my Flickr page HERE.