Retreat

East Coast Fellows Retreat Fall 2010

Written By:
2009 Hertz Fellow
Associate Professor, Princeton University

The 2010 East Coast Retreat took place from October 15-17. Around 30 Fellows met for dinner on Friday in Cambridge, including Jay Davis, Louis Lerman, Tom Weaver and some alumni Fellows in the Boston area. After dinner, we heard a talk from MIT Neuroscience Professor Sebastian Seung about mapping connections in the brain. The talk was received with surprising enthusiasm by the attendees, and we had to cut off the audience after half an hour of questions.

Date:
Oct 15, 2010 - Oct 17, 2010
Location:
Cambridge, MA

After dinner, around 20 Fellows drove out to Harvard Forest in Petersham, MA, where we spent the rest of the weekend under clear skies and beautiful fall foliage. We got acquainted on Saturday morning by playing charades with excerpts from scientific abstracts. Though it sounds difficult, the Fellows are surprisingly good: it took one team only 30 seconds to act out Plasmodium chabaudi (a malaria parasite). The remainder of the day consisted of chart talks from the Fellows, two talks from guest speakers, and a short hike. Our first guest was MIT Professor M. Fatih Yanik, who told us about the dizzying array of techniques under development in his lab for high-speed processing of C. elegans in microfluidic channels for drug development. In the evening, Jay Davis gave very interesting talk about his recent national security work in Washington.

The Retreat was sponsored by Louis Lerman and organized by Fellows Jeff Thompson, Brent Dorr, with help from the Hertz Foundation staff.

Pictures for this Workshop can be found by clicking the link: Fall 2010 East Coast Retreat