The Company of Biologists Workshops: supporting our community and inspiring new science

The Company of Biologists launched its Workshop series in 2010, with the goal of unifying researchers from diverse biological disciplines and fostering new ways of scientific thinking. A few years earlier, in 2005, the popular Madrid-based Juan-March meetings ended (Bosch, 2005). Soon after, another significant meeting series, the Ciba-Novartis Foundation symposia, was also discontinued (Abbott, 2008). The loss of these two major biomedical forums presented an opportunity for new initiatives. Around the same time, The Company of Biologists' Board of Directors, a team of experienced senior scientists from a range of life science and clinical research backgrounds (Bray et al., 2025), was considering innovative ways to amplify its support to the research community as a not-for-profit publisher. Simon Maddrell, renowned biologist and the Company's treasurer at the time, reached out to the newly appointed Director, Kate Storey, a developmental biologist at the University of Dundee, UK, challenging her to come up with inventive ideas for allocating the Company's charitable funds. Storey recalls discussing with James Briscoe (then a fellow Director, currently Editor-in-Chief of Development and a Principal Group Leader at The Francis Crick Institute, UK) the idea of launching a series of international Workshops to support cutting-edge biological research. ‘We were walking near my house in Dundee, overlooking the river Tay. We bashed ideas between us and came up with a proposal for the Workshop series to present to John Gurdon, Chair of the Company at the time’, said Storey. The duo envisioned these events to be prestigious and productive in supporting cutting-edge research in biology, while emphasising cross-disciplinary interactions. Nearly 2 years of careful planning led to the first three Workshops during 2010. ‘We aimed to highlight that scientific workshops should catalyse interactions between communities of researchers who usually don't engage with each other’, explained Briscoe.

The inaugural Workshop ‘Neural Stem Cells in Development and Disease’ was jointly organised by Kate Storey and Silvia Marino (Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, UK) in February 2010. A cohort of 30 scientists were brought together in Wiston House – a 16th century manor house set on the picturesque south coast of England, UK (Fig. 1). In an interview with Development, both the organisers described how the friendly setting of the venue, with armchair-filled rooms, stirred free-flowing discussions throughout the day. Marino remarked that her personal highlight was participants choosing to chat in the dining room well after midnight (Storey and Marino, 2010).

Since that first meeting, we have hosted over 50 Workshops. Topics and academic organisers are selected through a competitive application process overseen by a committee comprising members of the Company's Board of Directors. Applicants propose a theme for the Workshop, outlining the main topics to cover, along with motivations, anticipated outcomes of the meeting and a list of potential invited speakers. Proposals are then selected based on the novelty and cross-disciplinary potential of the topics. Steve Royle (University of Warwick, UK), a Director and Chair of the Workshops Committee, said, ‘When it comes to selecting Workshop topics, one of our main criteria is to keep these meetings fresh and to avoid repeating ourselves’. The selection committee ensures that suggested speakers are representative in terms of gender, ethnic diversity, geographical location, career and scientific backgrounds. Importantly, the Workshops are supported by a professional events team. As Frank O'Donnell, Events Organiser at the Company, explained, ‘We run the logistical aspects of these meetings, enabling the academic organisers to focus on the creative input and the scientific programmes. Together, we try to create the best possible environment for sharing research ideas and fostering scientific collaborations’.

At every Workshop, most attendees are group leaders, invited by the academic organisers. However, we are also committed to championing researchers in the early stages of their careers by bringing them together with some of the leaders in the field. At the inaugural Workshop, eight places were offered to early-career researchers (ECRs) through a competitive application process. These researchers (PhD students, postdocs and early-career PIs) were selected ‘on the basis of those most likely to benefit’. ‘We were looking for postdocs and students with relevant research experience, and also for clinical PhD students’, Storey told Development (Storey and Marino, 2010). Today, in addition to inviting 20 established PIs, every Workshop includes ten funded positions for ECRs, who are chosen from applications to participate and present their work alongside some of the leaders in the field. Attending these Workshops can be a formative experience for ECRs; James Gahan, who attended a Workshop in 2018 as a postdoc and has just started his own lab at the University of Galway, Ireland, commented, ‘I built many connections there that continue to influence my career’ (https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.202260). To maximise diversity among speakers, usually, only a single participant – invited speaker or selected ECR – from any individual lab can attend a Workshop.

Each Workshop is hosted in a retreat-like setting intended to create, as one attendee put it, the ‘perfect playground for science’ (https://thenode.biologists.com/meeting-report-chromatin-based-regulation-of-development-an-excellent-workshop-by-the-company-of-biologists/events/). We have used several UK venues for these events, including Wiston House on the South Downs, and – our current favourite – Buxted Park in East Sussex. In alignment with the framework proposed by the founders of the series, we deliberately host these events in attractive but remote locations to encourage attendees to commit to the full event, to stay on-site and to foster a relaxed collaborative environment. ‘Organising an intimate Workshop in a retreat-like setting is to ensure interactions between researchers who didn't know each other previously’, said James Briscoe. Eileen Furlong (European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany), who has attended several of our Workshops, concurred with Briscoe's sentiments, saying ‘The retreat-like setting, combined with the secluded atmosphere, ensures that the attendees spend a significant amount of time together. I believe that these meetings are an amazing opportunity for PhD students and postdocs’.

While the specifics of the programme may vary from event to event (see Box 1 for some of the more unusual formats we've explored over the years), each Workshop usually comprises scientific talks from all attendees – invited speakers and ECRs. Over the course of 3 days, every participant, irrespective of their career stage, is allotted the same time to speak, creating a non-hierarchical structure. Plenty of time is set aside for discussion – at the end of each talk, in dedicated discussion sessions intended to explore common themes and key challenges in a particular field, and in breaks between sessions. Outside the conference room, attendees usually spend a lot of time together during meals, evening drinks and group walks that allow them to get to know each other better. There is generally a formal seating plan at dinner, which is changed every evening to give delegates the opportunity to interact with new neighbours. The overall friendly atmosphere, along with carefully curated timetables, provides ECRs with ample time to engage with their senior colleagues. Often, a subset of attendees, including ECRs, volunteers to collaboratively produce review-type pieces highlighting the general themes covered in a Workshop, which are then published in relevant Company journals.

After each Workshop, we gather constructive feedback from participants through questionnaires to continuously improve these events. In the past 15 years, our Workshop series has evolved significantly, growing in reach and impact (see Fig. 2 for an overview of the scientific scope of our Workshops). From 2010 to 2018, we organised three Workshops per year. Given the overwhelmingly positive feedback we get from the community and the large number of excellent proposals received each year, we have more recently expanded the programme to six Workshops in the UK each year.

Additionally, we recently initiated our Global South Workshops programme, with the aim of hosting at least one Workshop every year in a Global South nation. Biological research from the Global South is under-represented worldwide (Nakamura et al., 2023), and it is often bureaucratically challenging for individuals of certain nationalities to obtain a short-term visa to visit the UK and other popular conference locations. We launched the Global South initiative to try and overcome this geographical challenge and provide an equitable international stage for researchers from Global South countries. This endeavour – spearheaded by Steve Royle and Frank O'Donnell – would also enable ECRs in the Global South to meet and network with peers and experts in their home countries. In March 2024, our inaugural Global South Workshop ‘How Global South Research Can Shape the Future of Comparative Physiology’ was organised in South Africa by Kênia Cardoso Bícego (São Paulo State University, Brazil) and Andrea Fuller (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa). To learn more about the experience, please read the related articles in Journal of Experimental Biology (Bars-Closel et al., 2024; Knight, 2025).

As a Company, we work hard to minimise the environmental impact of our scientific meetings by promoting sustainable practices, while still providing the crucial in-person interactions that make our events so valuable. As a response to the growing threat of climate change, we launched The Company of Biologists' Sustainability Initiative in 2020. A dedicated Sustainable Conferencing and Communications Officer oversees the Company's commitment to implementing environment-friendly practices in our Workshops. To this end, we keep our Workshops paperless because paper production is a massive contributor to environmental pollution (https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2021/05/11/the-sustainable-impact-of-a-paperless-office/). Instead, all event details are available through a dedicated app. We also collaborate with MyEmissions, a company that labels carbon emissions of food ingredients, to calculate the carbon footprint of the meals served in our Workshops. At the first 2024 Workshop, we achieved a ‘very low carbon footprint’ score for our catering. We also consciously choose ethically certified local food suppliers for the Workshop meals to support small businesses and the local communities. At each recent Workshop, we dedicate a day to veganism by serving exclusively plant-based meals. If interested, you can find out more about our sustainable food menus here: https://www.biologists.com/stories/sustainablemenuspart2/. Box 2 explains how some of our earlier Workshops also promoted sustainable dietary practices.

From a scientific perspective, the meetings intend to cover the full spectrum of the biological sciences. Over the years, some intriguing themes have emerged, suggesting that the Workshops have stayed ‘ahead of the curve’ in identifying research trends. Several of our Workshops have shed light on two broad research frontiers relevant to Development: neural development and the human brain, and chromatin structure and epigenetic modifications.

Research to uncover the molecular mechanisms underlying neural progenitor cell behaviour, and their dysregulation in cancer, has taken off in recent decades. The Company's inaugural Workshop brought together developmental biologists and neuro-oncologists. In addition to stimulating dialogue between the two disparate groups of scientists, this meeting explored the mechanisms involved in brain tumour development, which was indeed a hot research topic at the time (Henrique and Bally-Cuif, 2010; Storey and Marino, 2010). In the post-event questionnaire, attendees reflected that the Workshop was ‘relaxed and friendly’, ‘encouraging of scientific debates’ and ‘an ideal blend of exciting topics’.

The human brain is capable of extraordinary cognitive capacity when compared with the brains of other mammalian species. Although the study of human brain evolution is crucial to identify causes and to possibly develop therapeutics for human-specific neurodegenerative conditions, it received relatively little attention until the early 2010s. However, technological advances now make it possible to ask questions about the degree to which the human neocortex can be considered unique, how it has changed in shape, cell composition and connectivity over evolutionary time, and whether these changes can be traced back in fossils and genomic records. With the aim of tackling some of these issues, Arnold Kriegstein (University of California, San Francisco, USA) hosted ‘Evolution of the Human Neocortex: How Unique Are We?’ in 2013. This meeting brought together anthropologists, palaeontologists, developmental biologists, stem cell biologists, geneticists, molecular biologists and ethologists to highlight key areas of future work in diseases related to higher cortical function (Molnár and Pollen, 2014). Such was the success of this event that a second related Workshop on development and evolution of the human neocortex was held in 2018. ‘The timing of these Workshops was very fortuitous as they marked a turning point in our comprehension of human and non-human features of cortex development. Pioneering concepts presented by both senior leaders, including Nobel Laureate Svante Paabo, and rising junior investigators, were inspiring’, shared Kriegstein.

The 2010s also witnessed breakthroughs in approaches to study neuronal differentiation and development of in vitro models for neurological disorders. However, Madeline Lancaster (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK) and Denis Jabaudon (University of Geneva, Switzerland) identified an important knowledge gap: while very early stages of brain development could be recapitulated in the lab, later developmental events that give rise to in vivo-like neuronal circuits remained elusive. They hosted ‘Thinking Beyond the Dish: Taking In Vitro Neural Differentiation to the Next Level’ in 2018 – the first meeting of its kind to discuss the advantages and challenges of using in vitro organ-like models (organoids) as tractable alternatives to more complex model organism systems (Jabaudon and Lancaster, 2018). The organisers wrote, ‘The diversity of topics and attendees not only stimulated discussion, but also led to concrete plans for future collaboration, which was really a main goal’.

The concept of heritable traits being reliably passed from a mother cell to its daughter cells during division has long been recognised. However, the mechanisms by which daughter cells retain the gene expression or differentiation patterns of their parent cells, even in the absence of direct inheritance factors, are still incompletely understood. The inheritance of DNA methylation patterns offers one explanation, but epigenetic memory persists even when DNA methylation is absent. John Gurdon (University of Cambridge, UK), pioneer of cloning by nuclear transfer, and Helen Blau (Stanford University, CA, USA), an expert in cell fusion-based reprogramming, teamed up to arrange a Workshop on epigenetic memory. Held in 2012, this meeting tackled some of the biggest questions facing the epigenetics community at the time. ‘As epigenetic memory has not, to my knowledge, been addressed at stem cell meetings, it seemed to me appropriate at this time to make this the theme of this special Workshop’, Gurdon wrote in his proposal to The Company of Biologists. Attendees Amanda Fisher and Neil Brockdorff (both from the University of Oxford, UK) said, ‘One of the highlights of this extremely enjoyable meeting was a perception that we need to move away from traditional “non-genetic” definitions of epigenetics to those that take account of the impact of the underlying DNA sequence of the genome’ (Fisher and Brockdorff, 2012).

One issue that came up on several occasions at that Workshop was the extent to which epigenetic inheritance can occur across generations. This prompted Edith Heard (then at Institute Curie, Paris, France; now incoming Director of The Francis Crick Institute, UK) and Ruth Lehmann (Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA, USA) to propose a Workshop on the topic of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, combining genetics, evolution, environment, development and disease, which was held in 2015. ‘This was one of the most interesting and stimulating meetings of the year, even though I do not directly work on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’, Heard wrote in the Organiser's report after the Workshop.

As research in epigenetics and chromatin biology developed at a tremendous pace, Frederic Berger (Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology, Vienna, Austria) and Ines Drinnenberg (Institut Curie, Paris, France) highlighted that most studies remained confined to a few model organisms. They believed that, with advances in newly synthesised genomes, it was time to integrate the expertise in molecular evolution and chromatin biology. Thus, with the aim of fostering a new field of biology that applies molecular phylogeny, genomics, genetics and structural biology to chromatin and genome regulation studies, Berger and Drinnenberg hosted ‘Evo-Chromo: Towards an Integrative Approach of Chromatin Dynamics Across Eukaryotes’. Attendees, James Gahan and Alexander Blackwell, touted this meeting as ‘far from regular’, noting its intimate size and remarkable diversity in terms of speakers and scientific content (https://thenode.biologists.com/reflections-on-the-evo-chromo-workshop-november-2018/events/). The organisers speculated that, akin to the field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), evo-chromo also bore the potential to have a deep impact in biology. Indeed, in addition to prompting the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) to sponsor their own evo-chromo Workshop, the evo-chromo project was recently awarded the prestigious Austrian Science Fund. Berger shared, ‘The Evo-Chromo meeting, sponsored by The Company of Biologists, was the first one of its kind and structured the community around this new field of biology’.

When the Workshop programme was first set up, the founders intended for these events to be ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘to break new ground’ (Storey and Marino, 2010). According to James Briscoe, ‘the idea was to try and bridge across multiple biological disciplines and bring researchers together who didn't know each other’. In a recent chat, Kate Storey remarked that the Workshop series ‘has far exceeded her expectations’. Over the years, these meetings have explored a multitude of scientific topics, brought seemingly disparate communities of scientists together, shed light on emerging fields and inspired other organisations to conduct meetings on parallel topics, thereby fulfilling most of the foundational goals. ‘The wonderful thing about the Workshop series is that it has become self-sustaining and deeply integrated into the research community’, said Storey.

In the immediate future, we have already finalised our 2025 Workshops, and the details can be found at https://www.biologists.com/workshops/. Along with six UK-based Workshops that will cover a broad range of topics, our second Global South Workshop, ‘Democratising Microscopy in Latin America: Imaging Across Scales and Regions’ will be hosted in Ecuador in October 2025. While we are currently finalising our 2026 programmes, the application portal for 2027 Workshop proposals – both in the UK and Global South – is now open (https://www.biologists.com/workshops/propose-new-workshop/). If, having read this article, you have an idea for a Workshop, we encourage you to put in an application, or get in touch with us to find out more.

When asked how he foresees the future of this series, Steve Royle replied, ‘I hope we continue making a difference and keep breaking ground through the Workshops, offering novel topics and vibrant speaker line-ups to the community’. Royle said that one of our main goals is to strive towards maximum inclusivity and greater equity, which is often missing from scientific meetings. As mentioned above, Royle also recognises the importance of incorporating greener practices in our Workshops programme, and we are actively exploring other more sustainable venues for hosting these Workshops in the future. While several of these meetings resulted in the publication of high-quality review-type articles in our journals, the Workshop committee aspires for these meeting outputs to set even higher standards, raising crucial questions in the community. Royle hopes that, in the future, they might generate outputs that potentially match the impact of the report published after the 1975 Asilomar Conference – the pioneering meeting where leading biologists and lawyers first came together to address policy on recombinant DNA technology (https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/asilomar-conference-1975). Finally, supporting ECRs is a key Company objective; in the future, we hope to keep working towards increasing the representation of ECRs in our Workshops, especially individuals working outside elite institutions.

Reflecting on the launch of our Workshops programme, we have truly come a long way in 15 years and we look forward to many more years of inspiring the international community of biologists with these extraordinary events. With the community's support and enthusiasm, we are excited to continue making The Company of Biologists' Workshops series even more remarkable – one Workshop at a time.