It's Paris, It's Mecca, It's a Dream. Former students wax poetic when they reflect on their MBL days. 2013 Course Schedule

2013 Special Topics Courses

Analytical & Quantitative Light Microscopy

Directors: Greenfield Sluder , Jason Swedlow, Jagesh Shah, and Justin Taraska
A comprehensive and intensive course in light microscopy for researchers in biology, medicine, and material sciences. This course provides an in-depth examination of the theory of image formation and application of video methods for exploring subtle interactions between light and the specimen.

Biology of the Inner Ear: Experimental and Analytical Approaches
Directors: Paul Fuchs and Stefan Heller

Assistant Director: Jennifer Jones Rowsell
The Biology of the Inner Ear (BIE) course has adapted the intensive and focused approach that typifies MBL courses to provide students with the capacity to address important problems in auditory and vestibular research. Students with backgrounds in biological and physical/computational sciences and scientists new to investigations of the inner ear are particularly encouraged to apply.

BioMedical Informatics

Directors: James Cimino and Joyce Mitchell

Principal Investigator: Cathy Norton
This week-long survey course is designed to familiarize individuals with the application of computer technologies and information science in medicine. Through a combination of lectures and hands-on computer exercises, participants will be introduced to the conceptual and technical components of medical informatics.

Computational Image Analysis in Cellular and Developmental Biology
Directors:Gaudenz Danuser, Khuloud Jaqaman, Steve Altschuler, and Lani Wu
This 10 day course offers theory and hands-on training in the design and implementation of image processing software required for the quantitative and mechanistic analysis of light microscopy data in cellular and developmental biology. An additional subject in the course will be software design, addressing both the implementation of optimized algorithms and sharable code, including programming in teams. This course is targets students with fairly advanced knowledge of programming.

Frontiers in Stem Cells & Regeneration
Directors: Jennifer Morgan and Gerald P. Schatten
The Stem Cells and Regeneration Course (formerly known as FrHESC) is a dynamic, evolving laboratory and lecture course that includes the complete array of biological and medical perspectives from fundamental basic biology of "stemness" and mechanisms of regeneration through evaluation of pluripotent stem cells for therapeutic benefit.

Fundamental Issues in Vision Research
Summer 2014 Directors: Mary Ann Stepp, and Theodore Wensel

A two-week lecture and laboratory course, experimentally based and problem oriented, intended for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the early stages of vision research or planning to enter the field.  Students are presented with a comprehensive overview of current research areas and approaches that will help to broaden their understanding of this area.

Gene Regulatory Networks for Development
Directors: Eric Davidson and David McClay; Assistant Director: Isabelle Peter
A 10-day advanced course on gene regulatory systems as they pertain to development. The course is comprised of morning lectures followed by discussions; afternoon computation practicals, research clinics, systems assembly projects; and wet lab demonstrations of gene regulatory perturbation analysis in vivo. Faculty are leading experts in analysis of development at a systems level.

Immunohistochemistry & Microscopy
Directors: Eduardo Rosa-Molinar and Charles W. Frevert
The goal of the Immunohistochemistry and Microscopy (IHCM) course is to provide participants in-depth theory of and extensive hands-on experience with immunohistochemistry (IHC) techniques as well as theory and hands-on experience with a broad range of microscopic imaging techniques.  The course emphasizes hands-on experience, troubleshooting, and the exchange of ideas between and among faculty and participants.  The course will enable participants to independently carry out IHC and imaging in their laboratories and to critically evaluate and troubleshoot problems using IHC and microscopy techniques.  The interplay of theory, hands-on experience, and discussion is central to this course that serves advanced undergraduates, graduate students, laboratory technicians, postdoctoral students, and new and established faculty/research clinicians.  Students from groups underrepresented in science may apply for financial support for travel-related expenses and course registration (http://bit.ly/IHCM2013TravelAward).

Methods in Computational Neuroscience
Directors: Michale Fee and Mark Goldman
Animals interact with a complex world, encountering a wide variety of challenges: they must gather data about the environment, discover useful structures in these data, store and recall information about past events, plan and guide actions, learn the consequences of these actions, etc. These are, in part, computational problems that are solved by networks of neurons, from roughly 100 cells in a small worm to 100 billion in humans. Careful study of the natural context for these tasks leads to new mathematical formulations of the problems that brains are solving, and these theoretical approaches in turn suggest new experiments to characterize neurons and networks. This interplay between theory and experiment is the central theme of this course.

Molecular Biology of Aging
Directors: Matt Kaeberlein and Daniel Promislow
A three-week lecture and laboratory course featuring the newest and most exciting ideas in aging research, with emphasis on molecular approaches. A distinguished faculty will interact with students via lecture, discussion, hands-on experiments and analysis of data.

Molecular Mycology: Current Approaches to Fungal Pathogenesis
Directors: J. Andrew Alspaugh and Deborah A. Hogan
An intensive course designed to train advanced graduate students, post-docs, and independent investigators in different molecular methods used to study human fungal pathogens, and the models at the forefront of research on the mechanisms that underlie fungal diseases and their treatment.

Neuroinformatics (Delayed until 2014)
Directors: Partha Mitra and David Kleinfeld
The ability to digitally acquire, store and analyze large volumes of multichannel data in the neurosciences, ranging from multiple spike trains to brain images, has given rise to a new and growing body of research. This two-week course is structured around the related issues, and will contain both pedagogical lectures on the basic statistical techniques as well as focussed mini-workshops on specific neuroscience topics where applications of these techniques are critical.

NeuroStereology Workshop
Director: Mark West
The goal of the workshop is to teach research scientists how to design, supervise, and critically evaluate stereological studies of the nervous system.  Stereology is a methodology that provides meaningful quantitative descriptions of the geometry of three-dimensional structures from measurements that are made on two-dimensional images sampled from a structure of interest.

Optical Microscopy & Imaging in the Biomedical Sciences
Directors: Robert Hard and Hari Shroff
This course is designed for research scientists, postdoctoral trainees, and advanced graduate students in animal, plant, medical, and material sciences. Non-biologists seeking a comprehensive introduction to light microscopy and digital imaging will benefit greatly from the course. Both theoretical and practical fundamentals are stressed. An understanding of the basic principles of optics and/or some previous experience with light microscopes and imaging is highly desirable.

Seminar in the History of Biology
Topic: History of Sustainable Science
Directors: John Beatty , James Collins , and Jane Maienschein
This is an intensive week with annually varying topics designed for a group of no more than 25 advanced graduate students, postdoctoral associates, younger scholars, and established researchers in biology, history, philosophy, and the social sciences.

Strategies and Techniques for Analyzing Microbial Population Structures
Directors: Mitchell L. Sogin and David B. Mark Welch
The rapidly expanding flow of information from next generation DNA sequencing platforms has fueled healthy debate about best practices for data analysis while at the same time building a user demand for tools that can address important questions in microbial ecology. The STAMPS course consists of lectures by experts in the analysis of molecular datasets and hands-on tutorials in use of computational packages by their designers, and emphasizes discussion and the exchange of ideas between faculty and students. The course serves graduate students, postdoctoral students and established faculty from around the world.

Summer Program in Neuroscience, Ethics, & Survival (SPINES)
Directors: Keith Trujillo and Jean King
The Summer Program in Neuroscience, Ethics & Survival (SPINES) provides a rich experience in neuroscience. The core of the program is an intensive one-month experience, in which students are exposed to neuroscience laboratory techniques, contemporary neuroscience research, ethics and survival skills (including grant writing, teaching, public speaking, and others). Lecture, lab, workshop and discussion formats are used. In a second optional month, students may apply to work full time in a research laboratory at the MBL, especially those funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. The program is targeted to groups underrepresented in neuroscience to increase the probability of professional success, although applications from any qualified students interested in the SPINES curriculum are welcome. This is a full fellowship program; all costs of attending the course, including travel, housing, and meals at MBL are covered by the National Institute of Mental Health and MBL.

Workshop on Molecular Evolution
Directors: David Hillis and Mitchell L. Sogin
The Workshop on Molecular Evolution at Woods Hole presents a series of lectures, discussions, and bioinformatic exercises that span contemporary topics in molecular evolution. Since its inception in 1988, the workshop has encouraged the exchange of ideas between leading theoreticians, software developers and workshop participants. The workshop serves graduate students, postdoctoral students and established faculty from around the world.

Zebrafish Development and Genetics
Directors: Corinne Houart and Michael Granato
An intensive two-week course for advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and independent investigators that will focus on the development and genetics of zebrafish.  Participants will learn fundamental and state of the art techniques tailored to a broad range of zebrafish research through hands-on experience. Designed for participants from all areas of biology, laboratory exercises are designed to convey general principles and concepts.

Summer Courses
The MBL offers advanced, graduate-level courses in embryology, physiology, neurobiology, microbiology, reproduction, and parasitology for six to eight weeks each summer.