The Company of Biologists and the Woods Hole Embryology Course Free

The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) was founded in 1888 and provided summer courses in various biological fields (MacCord and Maienschein, 2018). Today, researchers brave the harsh Cape Cod winters to work at the MBL all year round, but the tradition of summer courses remains. As the MBL grew, the number of courses also expanded, and the Embryology course started in 1893. Embryology was a rapidly growing area in the 1890s, and the course aimed to introduce students to the latest concepts and methodology in the field (Maienschein, 2007). In those early years, students were taught techniques including fixing, staining and drawing, and they had to supply their own equipment to facilitate this (Maienschein, 2007). Today, the course is home to a range of cutting-edge tools thanks to its industry connections, which allow students to use the latest techniques to ask exploratory questions. The course also boasts a seemingly endless list of organisms, giving students access to embryos from across the tree of life. ‘[The Embryology course] is an outstanding opportunity to introduce students not just to the methods that are used, but also to a wide diversity of organisms that are used in developmental biology,’ said Nipam Patel, Director of the MBL and former Editor for Development. ‘But I think the more important thing is that the course really gives the students a sense that they can do anything, and that they should be brave.’

Woods Hole is mentioned in The Company of Biologists' records from 1993, when Development organised an Editors' meeting at the MBL. Chris Wylie was Editor-in-Chief at the time; he oversaw significant changes during his tenure, including the relaunch and rebranding of Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology (JEEM) as Development in 1987 (Smith, 2012; Wylie, 2012; Eve, 2025). Wylie was also keen to reinforce connections with researchers in the USA, so it is gratifying that the journal and the Company have become more closely associated with the Embryology Course over the years. This relationship includes personal connections; two of our Editors, Cassandra Extavour and Dominique Bergmann, took the course as students, with Extavour returning in subsequent years as an instructor. Liz Robertson taught on the course during her time at Harvard, Ken Poss has lectured on it, and Mansi Srivastava, one of our Guest Editors for Development's 2025 special issue on lifelong development, is teaching on the course this year. Our in-house team have also visited the course, including former Executive Editor, Katherine Brown (now Publishing Director at The Company of Biologists), and former Community Manager of the Node, Catarina Vicente. Richard Behringer, who together with Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado was a director of the course at the time, remembers Vicente's visit well: ‘[Catarina] gave us a talk on using social media such as Twitter [now known as X]. Ale and I immediately joined Twitter and began advocating for the course and for developmental biology.’

Alongside these personal connections, Development promotes the Embryology Course through publications and posts on our community site, the Node, and The Company of Biologists provides financial support to students wishing to attend. The Embryology Course attracts applicants from all over the world, presumably drawn both by an admiration for its history and by the course's potential to change their futures. Financial support is crucial to promote this diversity of students and to ensure that the course has a wide reach. You can read the experiences of the Embryology Course's most recent cohort in the accompanying Perspective (Abshire et al., 2025).

In this article, I explore the relationship between Development, The Company of Biologists and the Embryology Course. I consider the impact that the Embryology Course has on the careers of students who have attended (Fig. 1), including those who have received funding from the Company.

To facilitate student attendance, the MBL offers a range of financial support. Since 2003, The Company of Biologists has contributed funds to this support package, helping students to cover course fees, accommodation and travel expenses.

Several of the students we've supported have gone on to have successful careers, such as Joe Hanly, who attended the course in 2015 and is a recent winner of Development's 2024 Outstanding Paper Prize (Briscoe et al., 2024). Hanly is now a postdoc at The George Washington University, USA, where he uses butterfly wing patterns to study how genomes generate phenotypes. ‘As a graduate student, I was really excited to understand how butterfly wing patterns develop and, largely inspired by the work of the lab of Sean Carroll on Drosophila wing patterns, I wanted to study the roles of cis-regulatory elements,’ Hanly explained. ‘I was really well placed in my PhD lab to learn the population genetics skills to find candidate regions in natural populations, but I wanted to expand my skillset in developmental biology with the goal of being able to pursue these questions.’

Alice Accorsi, who attended the Embryology Course in 2013 with funding from The Company of Biologists, recently started their own lab at The University of California, Davis (UC Davis), USA. ‘The Embryology Course in Woods Hole creates a one-of-a-kind environment where everyone's excitement about science is contagious, and experiments are happening 24/7,’ Accorsi recalled. ‘The faculty were extremely approachable, friendly and eager to help me with imaging or running experiments. I spent countless hours talking and thinking about science. The location also plays a big part in making this work: the laboratories, facilities, rooms and dining hall are all close to each other, and every building has so much history. Being surrounded by so many scientists on top of their field and interested in all aspects of biology made me feel energised and ready to start my postdoctoral research.’

The Company also supported Joaquín Navajas Acedo's attendance on the Embryology Course. Navajas Acedo is now a postdoctoral researcher in Alex Schier's lab at the University of Basel, Switzerland, where he works on nervous system development in zebrafish and he was recently selected as one of Development's Pathway to Independence fellows for 2025. Navajas Acedo attended the course in 2016, when he was a PhD student at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, USA. ‘I decided to take the Embryology Course because everyone [at Stowers] spoke so wonderfully about it,’ Navajas Acedo said. He found the course to be transformative: ‘Those 6 weeks changed my life. I not only met friends for life, but I got access to all these wonderful animals and tools. I was very tired, but I was very happy. It wasn't unusual finding people at the scope at 4 am (including Nipam), looking at things with cilia that beat very fast or trying to make chimaeras of a chicken and a second unknown organism.’

Like Navajas Acedo, Martyna Lukoseviciute's research interests lie in the nervous system. She took the course in 2018, and she is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, working on spinal cord repair and regeneration. ‘My PhD advisor encouraged me to attend to deepen my understanding of advanced embryology techniques and to broaden my knowledge of embryo development across various species,’ Lukoseviciute said. ‘The course was an incredible journey, from connecting with passionate peers from around the world to learning from dedicated and knowledgeable faculty members. One of the most memorable aspects was the diversity of species we had the chance to work with, which made every hands-on session exciting and enriching.’

Alongside providing financial support for students, the Company has helped spread awareness of the course via Development's community site, the Node. As well as promoting the course application deadline and publishing blogs written by students who have attended in recent years, the Node has hosted Embryology course image competitions. The first of these image competitions took place in 2011; Embryology students were encouraged to submit images captured during the course, and the Node's readers voted for their favourites. The overall winner was published on Development's cover (Fig. 2A). The competitions ran until 2017 and, in 2018, Development featured an image from the EMBO Practical Course on Developmental Biology in Quintay, Chile, another fantastic training initiative inspired by the Woods Hole Embryology Course that is based in Latin America. Many readers will also be familiar with the Node's postcards that we often give away at conferences, which have featured images taken by students on the Embryology Course (Fig. 2B). Our current Community Manager at the Node, Joyce Yu, is working with the Embryology Course Directors to rekindle these traditions and to continue spreading the word about the course. For Patel, the Node provides an important voice for the Embryology Course outside of the USA, helping to ensure that the course receives applications from the global developmental biology community. ‘The Company of Biologists provides an almost unparalleled connection to the community, especially in Europe,’ Patel explained. ‘We have good ties with the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) and their society journal [Journal of Developmental Biology] in the United States, but we also get an incredible number of international students, and I think The Company of Biologists helps enormously with that.’

Through Development, The Company of Biologists has also published work that originated on the Embryology Course (a complete list of Embryology Course-related papers can be found on the course website). ‘Development is a real community journal, and publishes really high-quality work in the field,’ said Patel. ‘It's a great outlet for disseminating the information that the students generate.’

One example is a 2022 article by Christine Hirschberger and Andrew Gillis about the evolution of the pseudobranch in jawed fishes (Hirschberger and Gillis, 2022). Their paper makes use of skate (Leucoraja erinacea), which can be easily obtained from the Marine Resources Centre at the MBL. Over the years, Development has published studies that grew from initial experiments or discussions that happened during the Embryology Course (Gong and Brandhorst, 1988; Nisson et al., 1989; Miller et al., 1995; McClay and Logan, 1996; Logan and McClay, 1997; Chang and Harland, 2007). In an article from 1996, Suresh Jesuthasan, who was a researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, at the time, explores zebrafish neural crest cell migration and acknowledges the Embryology Course ‘for the introduction to video microscopy’ (Jesuthasan, 1996). There is even an example of a Techniques and Resources article in which the methodology was tested during the Embryology Course prior to publication (Worley et al., 2013).

The Embryology Course has also featured in Development's Review content; for example, an introduction to tissue clearing published in 2021 included an image of a short-tailed fruit bat that was captured during the Embryology Course (Vieites-Prado and Renier, 2021) (Fig. 2C).

The Embryology Course has the potential to alter the course of students' careers and to reignite their enthusiasm for research during challenging times (Fig. 3). Alongside this, the course extends professional networks and promotes future collaborations, bringing the developmental biology community together. Here, I present some examples of how former students, including those funded by The Company of Biologists, have been impacted by their time on the course.

The course can help researchers enter new fields, since one of its aims is to open new horizons for students. ‘We love to see the students really getting way out of their comfort zone,’ said Patel. ‘We designed the course so that it works for either students with a lot of background, or students who are new to the field.’

Louis Prahl took the course in 2021 (the first instalment to take place following the COVID-19 pandemic) after joining Alex Hughes' lab at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. ‘I decided to switch fields for my postdoc and became interested in how I could apply my engineering background to study how tissues and organs develop,’ Prahl told us. ‘I wanted to take the Embryology Course to learn broadly about how developmental biologists ask questions and pick up some experimental techniques to bring back to the lab.’ Prahl is now looking to start his own research group, and he was selected as one of Development's Pathway to Independence fellows in 2024.

Lukoseviciute also felt that the course has provided her with the confidence to try new approaches. ‘In my postdoc, I have embraced this fearless approach by switching to a new model organism and independently developing organoid systems,’ she said. ‘The distinction between what I'm ‘good at’ and what I ‘want to explore’ has become blurred, and I feel uninhibited in stepping into the unknown. This course taught me that failure isn't a setback – it's a step forward in the journey of discovery.’

For Accorsi, the Embryology Course led to the discovery of their research niche. For their PhD, Accorsi had been working on the immune system of the apple snail (Pomacea canaliculata), an invasive species in North America and South-East Asia. During the Embryology Course, they realised the snail's potential as a model for studying eye regeneration. ‘It was at the Embryology Course that I met Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado,’ Accorsi explained. ‘His work made me extremely interested in regeneration, and our interactions during the course made it possible for me to join his laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher to study the regeneration of the visual system in the apple snail.’

After returning from the Embryology Course, Accorsi received a Travelling Fellowship from Development, which allowed them to collaborate with Alejandro and collect data that helped form the foundations of their postdoctoral research. Accorsi went on to start their own lab in 2024, where they continue leveraging the apple snail to understand eye regeneration and evolution (McCulloch, 2024). ‘Initially inspired by the topics discussed in the course, I persevered with this project, and it has now become the main research program of the Accorsi lab at UC Davis,’ Accorsi said. ‘While I always wanted to pursue a career in science, the Embryology Course, the people I met and the questions I became curious about during that experience have dramatically shaped my career and research.’

Early-career researchers are the future of the field, but they often face many challenges, from insecure employment contracts and intense competition for funding to experiments not working and projects hitting roadblocks. In the face of these challenges, it seems that the course can provide a crucial boost for researchers who might be unsure about continuing with a scientific career. ‘[The Embryology Course] reaffirmed to me that I wanted to pursue an academic career, and instilled a lot of confidence in me that I had some skills that would help me do that,’ Hanly said. Meanwhile, our Editor Dominique Bergmann said the course ‘kept [her] in science’ by exposing her to a breadth of developmental systems at a time when her PhD project in her home lab was entering a challenging phase. Lukoseviciute expressed similar thoughts when asked about the impact the course had on her career: ‘Honestly, the course reignited my love for science. Before attending, I had doubts about whether I wanted to continue pursuing a scientific career. However, the course reminded me that science is rooted in curiosity, connections and experimentation – and that discovery can be incredibly rewarding.’

As well as encountering novel systems, Embryology students form lifelong friendships, leading to future collaborations. ‘I met people who I have gone on to collaborate with over the years, or continue to see at conferences,’ said Hanly. Prahl echoed this sentiment: ‘I gained a network of colleagues and friends who span various career stages and fields. I learned so much about developmental biology and gained a sense of boldness in the lab, where I feel very comfortable working with new (to me) organisms, approaches and questions.’

The students may also form long associations with the MBL. Navajas Acedo and Accorsi enjoyed the Embryology Course so much that they both returned as a teaching assistants (TAs) in subsequent years. ‘I went back as a TA because I value teaching and, having gone through it myself as a student, wanted to give back to the broader [developmental biology] community by preaching about how superb zebrafish is as a model organism,’ said Navajas Acedo. ‘I think there is something magical about watching people doing an experiment you have done dozens of times for the first time, which you can also use to evaluate things about how you do it! It's such a privilege.’ Navajas Acedo hopes his association with Woods Hole will continue. ‘I hope someday I can go back as Faculty and keep giving back to the community,’ he said.

At 100, The Company of Biologists is still young in comparison to the MBL and its famous summer courses. We are proud to contribute to the Woods Hole Embryology Course, a transformative experience that has shaped the careers of so many developmental biologists since the late 1800s. While writing this article, it has been wonderful to hear about the successes of students who have received funding from the Company to attend the course, and to learn how their experiences in a small corner of Massachusetts have shaped their careers.

The Development team are also pleased to have formed so many personal connections with both the faculty who run the course and the students who attend it. ‘I was one of Development's Editors for quite a number of years, and I really appreciated the quality of the journal,’ said Patel, as he reflected on the occasion of The Company of Biologists' 100th birthday. ‘I also published in other journals published by The Company of Biologists, and I think that they do an outstanding job. So, it's great to see such a long history continuing and the continued success of the organisation.’ As we enter our second century, we look forward to continuing our association with the Embryology Course and helping to promote early-career researchers embarking on their academic paths. You can look out for news from this year's course on the Node, as the latest generation of Embryology students dip their toes into the unique environment of Woods Hole.