The Company of Biologists celebrates its first Global South Workshop

Attending an inspirational workshop early in your career can be a life-defining moment. You could meet an extraordinary mentor, establish a fundamental collaboration, encounter a presentation that triggers a pivotal change in thought to inform your life's work. Grasping these opportunities to branch out and venture in new directions might define your future in wonderful and unimaginable ways. Understanding this, The Company of Biologists has, since 2010, funded and hosted intimate scientific workshops, designed to inspire experts and early-career scientists from a diverse variety of scientific backgrounds by providing an environment that stimulates the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary ideas (Adhikari, 2025).

However, when Frank O'Donnell, Meetings Organiser at The Company of Biologists, reviewed the Workshops' outreach in 2022, he discovered that one demographic was almost absent. ‘I worked out that fewer than ten people that had attended our events were based in Global South countries’, says O'Donnell. Realising that the Company might have the opportunity to rectify the omission, O'Donnell contacted Company Director Stephen Royle, Chair of the Company's Workshop Committee, with the idea of reserving a place for an application from a Global South country to organise one of the 2024 Workshops. ‘Travelling to the UK from overseas has become more restrictive and since our mission is to support biologists wherever they are, it made sense to try to improve access to our Workshops in the Global South’, says Royle. Fortunately, when Royle presented the idea to the Board of Directors, they were enthusiastic. The Company of Biologists Global South Workshop programme was launched.

The Company sent out a call for applications to researchers across the world and when a friend passed it on to Andrea Fuller, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, she realised that this could provide a fabulous opportunity to host a comparative physiology workshop in the Global South. It also occurred to her that Kênia Bicego, São Paulo State University, Brazil, with whom she had previously worked on a workshop in Brazil, would be an ideal co-organiser. Putting their heads together, the duo came up with a programme of invited speakers from the Global South and North, with a view to exploring how comparative physiology can inform and interact with other disciplines. ‘[We wanted to provide] opportunities for Global South researchers to build the networks and support that they need to go forward in the future’, says Fuller. She also had the ideal venue in mind. ‘I had organised a thermal physiology conference in the Kruger National Park in 2014, which Kênia came to and loved’, Fuller explains. So, when she raised the possibility of hosting the meeting in Brazil, Bicego responded instantly, ‘We're coming to Kruger’.

However, Fuller and Bicego's application was up against impressive competition and Royle recalls, ‘We really wanted it [the Workshop] to be a success, so there was pressure to get it right’. The decision came down to which of the 12 possible applications would make the biggest difference to researchers in the region and the Workshop Committee agreed that Fuller and Bicego's proposal best fitted the bill.

With 20 well-funded places to offer early-career researchers from the Global South, and with an eye to the future of comparative physiology, Fuller and Bicego decided that they would only accept applications from early-career researchers that had completed their PhDs at minimum. ‘We wanted people who were committed to an academic career’, Fuller explains, adding that the applications were ‘all from good young researchers who had published high quality papers in good journals’. In the end, the successful applicants came from across the Global South, including Central and South America, Africa, China and India (Fig. 1). However, the organisation required to transfer a UK Workshop to the middle of a game reserve in Africa was complex. ‘I think the travel logistics gave Frank [O'Donnell] some headaches', she says, explaining that orchestrating transport to the heart of the national park for the early-career researchers required that they arrived at least one day before the Workshop to take the 6 h bus ride from Johannesburg's O. R. Tambo International Airport to the Skukuza Conference Centre.

When the delegates arrived on 10 March 2024, the national park was in the middle of an intense heatwave. ‘Our plans were for everyone to come to the Skukuza ‘boma’ – an enclosed area with wooden poles where you sit around a fire for protection from wild animals – to have our 1 min introductions and dinner’, says Fuller. However, the fire was cancelled during dinner and the introductions relocated to the conference centre owing to the heat (Fig. 2). When the main programme began the following morning, Fuller and Bicego ensured that the early-career researchers had the opportunity to introduce their research early in the programme, interspersing their presentations with those of the invited speakers. ‘We had talks about mole rats, lizards, birds, crabs, moths, rats, whales, sharks, lions, rhinos, showing the incredible diversity of their research. How amazing is that?’, Fuller exclaims. The programme also included discussion sessions, with groups of delegates debating and developing ideas around a specific topic that they were allocated.

Relaxation was another key component of the meeting, with Fuller prioritising time for more casual conversation between sessions, allowing delegates to network informally and cement relationships, in addition to programming two game drives, which allowed the delegates to experience the park's iconic wildlife first hand. Considering the early-career researcher's comfort, Fuller and O'Donnell insisted that each was given an individual room with its own facilities and priceless view of the spectacular Sabie River. ‘We wanted them to go back after the talks, to sit on their patios, where they'd look at elephants drinking in the river and chat to each other’, she says, with the hope that the five-star treatment would give the early-career delegates a sense of their importance as the future of the comparative physiology community. ‘The Workshop was about them’, Fuller explains.

Reflecting on the meeting's achievements, Fuller says, ‘It focused on the value of, and how to advance, comparative physiology’ and she is optimistic that the approach will stimulate a resurgence of the field in the Global South. ‘We put all of the delegates in touch with each other and we started a Google Drive where everyone can put information about the equipment that they want to share, resources for funding and travel grants to improve access to resources and opportunities’, says Fuller. Fostering a sense of community was one of Fuller's other major goals, and she says, ‘Even the South African early-career researchers hadn't necessarily met each other before, so we've decided we're going to meet again soon’. She is also optimistic that the Workshop's impact will spread further as delegates from South America, South Africa and Australia are currently discussing establishing a new four-yearly Austral comparative physiology conference, allowing the Global South community to congregate and benefit from a meeting focusing on the strengths and challenges of research and collaboration in their local area.

The early-career researchers that were fortunate enough to attend the meeting were definitely enthusiastic about the experience (Bars-Closel et al., 2024). ‘It was powerful to meet Global South researchers who have succeeded despite the many challenges they face, which brought a sense of possibility’, says Daniel Carneiro Moreira from the University of Brasilia, Brazil, who spoke about his work on the greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella) as a model organism for comparative biochemistry and physiology. For Tshepiso Majelantle, an early-career researcher from Botswana, the Workshop exceeded her expectations. ‘I had a really incredible conversation with Prof Tobias Wang’, she says, adding, ‘It was really thought provoking to hear a funded Global North perspective and seeing how he found my perspective and experience from the Global South enlightening’. Even more importantly, the contacts that she made at the Workshop resulted in the offer of a postdoctoral research position from Andrea Fuller at the University of the Witwatersrand University, and Majelantle is currently involved in two papers that are destined for submission to Journal of Experimental Biology. ‘I think it is safe to say my career has benefited tremendously from the Workshop’, she chuckles (Fig. 3).

‘The idea of a Workshop is that it should be a “retreat”’, says Royle, and the first Global South Workshop hosted by The Company of Biologists definitely lived up to the brief. ‘Finding a beautiful location, thanks to the organisers’ inside knowledge, really helped make the event special’, says Royle, adding that the Company hopes to capitalise on local experience when organising future Global South Workshops. Building on the initial success, the Company has already lined up two more Workshops. The first, ‘Democratising Microscopy in Latin America: Imaging Across Scales and Regions’, will be held in Banos, Ecuador, in October 2025. ‘Our attendees will be able to discuss their research surrounded by incredible views of the “Gateway to the Amazon”’, says O'Donnell. The organisers, Mariana De Niz (Northwestern University, USA), Licyel Paulas Condori (Universidad Catolica Bolviana, Bolivia) and Mario Del Rosario (Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencias, Portugal) aim to foster regional and international collaborations, in addition to improving access to training across Latin America to enable high quality science in regions where researchers do not traditionally have access to costly state-of-the-art equipment. The 2026 Workshop, ‘Integrative Ecology in the Global South’, will be hosted in India, with the intention of building a network of interconnected ecologists across the tropics – most of which is classified as the Global South. Anusha Shankar's (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Hyderabad, India) initial proposal for a Workshop was unsuccessful; however, she was fortunate to attend the Workshop in South Africa and, after learning from the experience, reapplied, this time with Sanjay Sane (National Centre for Biological Sciences, India) and Anand Krishnan (Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, India). ‘I thought that a Global South comparative physiology Workshop would be wonderful…to increase training, data availability and comparative physiology work in the tropics’, says Shankar, who is thrilled that the Workshops are coming to India.

‘I'm really excited to discover how these events go and to hear how participants, especially early-career researchers, benefit from attending the Workshops', says Royle looking to the future. And as The Company of Biologists celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025, its commitment to supporting and nurturing research across the globe through groundbreaking Meetings and Workshops is entering a new era, prioritising researchers in the Global South to foster truly international collaboration that creates a more equitable, diverse and inclusive global scientific community.