By Ansa Cobham

The 2019 GRS/GRC conference on Developmental Biology was held at Mount Holyoke college, South Hadley Massachusetts. It started on the 15th of June with a seminar organized and attended by PhD Students and Postdocs on the “Emergence of Complex Tissues from Single Cell Behaviour and Cooperation”, which was followed by the conference on “Identity and Diversity: Developmental Biology from Molecules to Cells to Organisms” from the 16th – 21st of June 2019. I attended both the seminar and the conference, which hosted excellent talks and poster presentations from students and researchers from different parts the world.

For me, one of the most exciting parts of this conference was learning about the development and extensive use of single-cell analysis techniques including transcriptomics, genomics, epigenomics, and proteomics. These techniques are currently being applied across a broad range of organisms to understand the process of development in organism function and in identifying disease. Another highlight of the conference for me was being able to meet and interact face-to-face with some of the experts in Drosophila developmental biology and keeping up-to-date with the most recent emerging technologies.

I left the conference with so much enthusiasm and lots of ideas for my PhD project. I am very appreciative to the organisers of the seminar and conference for creating such a platform in a beautiful and serene environment, and also especially for funding part of my registration. Also, I am grateful to Monash university for funding my travel to attend this prestigious conference.