Category Archives: Cold Spring Harbor
I survived giving my first large conference talk as a PhD student
By Lei Shen When I was in the middle of designing my poster, an email from the organizers of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory‘s Asia Conference arrived informing me that my abstract was selected to
Posted by china, Cold Spring Harbor, conferences, Early Career Research Community, ECR, featured, mitochondria
inIf you want to go to a #manel or a #YAMMM check out Cold Spring Harbor Asia meetings – where men get to speak about stuff
I just got an email about this meeting: CSH Asia 2016 Conference on Microbial Communities in the Environment: Emerging Technologies and New Frontiers:
So the first thing I did was to look at the gender ratio of speakers. I dug into each person listed here as much as a I could and attempted to infer what their gender is. I realize this is fraught with problems and have written about this previously. So as much as possible I looked for what pronouns were used to describe these people before infer their possible gender. I was unable to get any clear gendered pronouns for one person but the others I think I got enough evidence to make a hypothesis. I colored those I inferred to be male in yellow and those I inferred to be female in green.
Organizers
So the first thing I did was to look at the gender ratio of speakers. I dug into each person listed here as much as a I could and attempted to infer what their gender is. I realize this is fraught with problems and have written about this previously. So as much as possible I looked for what pronouns were used to describe these people before infer their possible gender. I was unable to get any clear gendered pronouns for one person but the others I think I got enough evidence to make a hypothesis. I colored those I inferred to be male in yellow and those I inferred to be female in green.
Organizers
- Dusko Ehrlich, INRA, France
- Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago, USA
- Nan Qin, Zhejiang University, China
- Ting Zhu, Tsinghua University, China
- Dusko Ehrlich, INRA, France
- Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago, USA
- Christopher Carr , Massachusetts Institute of Technology , USA
- Yehuda Cohen , Nanyang Technological University , SINGAPORE
- Alana Firl , University of California, Davis , USA
- Andrew Holmes , University of Sydney , AUSTRALIA
- George Kowalchuk , Utrecht University , NETHERLANDS
- Shuangjiang Liu , Institute of Microbiology, CAS , CHINA
- Nan Qin , Zhejiang University , CHINA
- Jacques Ravel , University of Maryland , USA
- Peter Turnbaugh , University of California, San Francisco , USA
- George Weinstock , Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine , USA
- Paul Wilmes , University of Luxembourg , LUXEMBOURG
- Gary Wu , University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine , USA
- Ruifu Yang, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, CHINA
- Yunsheng Yang , Chinese PLA General Hospital , CHINA
- Jun Yu , The Chinese University of Hong Kong , CHINA
- Yu-Zhong Zhang , Shandong University , CHINA
- Liping Zhao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, CHINA
- Jizhong Zhou , University of Oklahoma, USA
- Ting Zhu , Tsinghua University , CHINA
Thus of the speakers (keynotes and invited) I infer a ratio of 18 men to 2 women (and one unknown). So that is 10% women. Not remotely representative of the gender in the general area of microbial communities.
And sadly this is not the first time I have seen such skewed ratios in meetings from Cold Spring Harbor. See for example: Yet another mostly male meeting (YAMMM) from Cold Spring Harbor and
Cold Spring Harbor presents the men's only view on the evolution of sequencing and Cold Spring Harbor Labs: Guest post on Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM) - Programming for Biology
I note - this whole thing saddens me even more because one of the invited female speakers is Alana Firl, who is a post doc at UC Davis jointly working in my lab and Sundar's lab. She is completely awesome and brilliant. But this meeting? Well, it is a manel (a panel of mostly men). A YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting). And a disappointment.
So I decided to see if maybe it was just this meeting in the CSHL Asia series and if others were all OK. So I went to their list of past meetings and looked at just the keynote speakers.
Precision Cancer Biology and Medicine: 3 keynotes. All male.
Membrane Proteins: Structure and Function. 1 keynote. Male.
Lipid Metabolism and Human Metabolic Disorders. 3 keynotes. All male.
Frontiers of Plant Biology: Epigenetics & Development. 2 keynotes. Both male.
Novel Insights into Glia Function & Dysfunction. 3 keynotes. All male.
Francis Crick Symposium: Advances in Neuroscience. 2 keynotes. One male. One female.
Molecular Basis of Aging and Disease. 4 keynotes. 3 male.
Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy. 2 keynotes. Both male.
And I went to their list of future meetings and looked at a few (in fields I knew a bit about)
Frontiers in Single Cell Genomics: three keynotes - all male
Telomere and Telomerase: one keynote - male
Synthetic Biology: one keynote - male
Chromatin, Epigenetics and Transcription: three keynotes -all male
DNA Metabolism, Genomic Stability and Diseases: two keynotes - one male and one female
Latest Advances in Plant Development & Environmental Response/AWAJI,JAPAN: two keynotes - both male
Systems Biology of Gene Regulation and Genome Editing: no keynotes yet
So in these meetings it is 29:3 male to female for the keynote talks. Less than 10% female. Great. CSH Asia meetings. Where men get to speak about all the stuff they know.
Posted by Cold Spring Harbor, gender bias, meetings, Microbiology, YAMMM
inCold Spring Harbor presents the men’s only view on the evolution of sequencing
On June 5 I posted a guest blog post by an anonymous person writing about the Programming for Biology workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Labs: Guest post on Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM) - Programming for Biology
And this post generated some responses including yesterday a series of responses from whomever is behind the Cold Spring Harbor Meetings Twitter account.
Sounds great. And I retweeted all of these.
And then I got an email invite to a new Cold Spring Harbor Meeting: The Evolution of Sequencing Technology: A Half Century of Progress
With a long long list of speakers. Alas, the gender ratio here of speakers is abyssmal. I have highlighted men in yellow and women in green (with the caveat that I always try to giver that assigning gender from names or appearance or records is not always accurate)
UPDATE 2 - Some discussion of this post on Twitter
@phylogenomics @mike_schatz We do have a role. Course instructors develop speaker lists but we work with them, especially on diversity. 1/5— CSHL Meetings (@cshlmeetings) June 23, 2015
@phylogenomics @mike_schatz Gender, race/ethnicity, U.S. representation, and geographic region are some ways we look at diversity. 2/5— CSHL Meetings (@cshlmeetings) June 23, 2015
@phylogenomics @mike_schatz The gender skew in the 2014 Programming course came up last year and we talked to Simon and Sofia about it. 3/5— CSHL Meetings (@cshlmeetings) June 23, 2015
@phylogenomics @mike_schatz Simon & Sofia teach a great course that is always very well received and evaluated by its students. 4/5— CSHL Meetings (@cshlmeetings) June 23, 2015
@phylogenomics @mike_schatz They'll teach a great course again this year and ensure its list of guest lecturers includes more women. 5/5— CSHL Meetings (@cshlmeetings) June 23, 2015
Sounds great. And I retweeted all of these.
And then I got an email invite to a new Cold Spring Harbor Meeting: The Evolution of Sequencing Technology: A Half Century of Progress
With a long long list of speakers. Alas, the gender ratio here of speakers is abyssmal. I have highlighted men in yellow and women in green (with the caveat that I always try to giver that assigning gender from names or appearance or records is not always accurate)
- Mark Adams, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Gillian Air, University of Oklahoma
- Shankar Balasubramanian, University of Cambridge, UK
- Hagan Bayley, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Ltd.
- David Bentley, Illumina Cambridge, Ltd
- Sydney Brenner, Salk Institute for Biological Studies
- Nigel Brown, University of Edinburgh, UK
- George Brownlee, University of Oxford, UK
- Graham Cameron, Bioinformatics Resource, Australia EMBL
- Piero Carninci, RIKEN Ctr.for Life Science Technologies, Japan
- Norman Dovichi, University of Notre Dame
- J. William Efcavitch, Molecular Assemblies, Inc.
- Miguel Garcia-Sancho, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Mark Gerstein, Yale University
- Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago
- Walter Gilbert, Harvard University
- Philip Green, University of Washington
- Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology
- Clyde Hutchison, J. Craig Venter Institute
- James Kent, University of California, Santa Cruz
- Jonas Korlach, Pacific Biosciences
- Victor Ling, BC Cancer Agency, Canada
- David Lipman, NCBI/NLM National Instiutes of Health
- James Lupski, Baylor College of Medicine
- Thomas Maniatis, Columbia University Medical Center
- W. Richard McCombie, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Joachim Messing, Waksman Institute, Rutgers University
- Gene Myers, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology & Genetics, Germany
- Richard Myers, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology
- Debbie Nickerson, University of Washington
- James Ostell, NLM/NCBI
- Stephen Quake, Stanford University/HHMI
- Charles Richardson, Harvard Medical School
- Richard Roberts, New England BioLabs
- Jane Rogers, The Genome Analysis Centre, UK
- Mostafa Ronaghi, Illumina, Inc.
- Yoshiyuki Sakaki, University of Tokyo
- Jay Shendure, University of Washington
- Melvin Simon, Caltech
- Hamilton Smith, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Lloyd Smith, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- J. Craig Venter, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Robert Waterston, University of Washington
- James Watson, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Jean Weissenbach, Genoscope, France
- Barbara Wold, Caltech
- Huanming Yang, Beijing Genomics Institute, China
That is right. 47 speakers. 4 of which are female. For a whopping 7.8 % female speakers. This is one of the most extreme skews I have seen for any meeting. This truly makes me sick to my stomach. Since there are plenty of women who have had and still have fundamentally important roles in the field of sequencing and sequencing technology I infer that this most likely reflects some type of bias in the meeting organization and planning process.
The meeting page lists the organizers as
UPDATE 6/29/15 7 PM PST
Apparently this meeting is part of a series on the history of molecular biology. The meeting page says
So I decided to take a peek at these meetings I started with Biotechnology: Past, Present & Future (2008).
Speakers are listed below:
The meeting page lists the organizers as
- Mark Adams, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Nigel Brown, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Robert Waterston, University of Washington
And one of the major sponsors as Illumina.
I think they all have some explaining to do.
One last note - the meeting description says "The opening session will include a tribute to Frederick Sanger, the father of DNA sequencing, and will cover the early efforts in protein, RNA and DNA sequencing." Really? The father of DNA sequencing? Seems perfect for this meeting I guess.
UPDATE 6/29/15 7 PM PST
Apparently this meeting is part of a series on the history of molecular biology. The meeting page says
The CSHL/Genentech Center Conferences on the History of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology (http://library.cshl.edu/hosted-meetings) aim to explore important themes of discovery in the biological sciences, bringing together scientists who made many of the seminal discoveries that began the field with others whose interests may include the current status of the field, the historical progress of the field, and/or the application of these techniques and approaches in biotechnology and medicine. Previous meetings in the series have included:
Biotechnology: Past, Present & Future (2008)
History of Restriction Enzymes (2013)
Messenger RNA: From Discovery to Synthesis and Regulation in Bacteria and Eukaryotes (2014)
Plasmids: History & Biology (2014)
Organizers
- Mila Pollock
- Jan Witkowski
- Sydney Brenner
- Peter Feinstein
- Lee Hood
- Tom Maniatis
- Richard Roberts
- Garen Bohlin
- Robert Bud
- Don Comb
- Peter Feinstein
- Maryann Feldman
- Herbert Heyneker
- John H. Leamon
- Yuk-Lam Lo
- Alan McHughen
- Stelios Papadopoulos
- Rich Roberts
- Robert Steinbrook
- Kenneth Thibodeau
- Marc Van Montagu
- Charles Weissmann
- Julie Xing
For speakers that comes to 14:2 male:female or 12.5 % female
Next I went to History of Restriction Enzymes (2013).
Organizers
Next I went to History of Restriction Enzymes (2013).
Organizers
- Herb Boyer, University of California, San Francisco
- Stu Linn, University of California, Berkeley
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Richard Roberts, New England BioLabs
- Aneel Aggarwal, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
- Werner Arber, University of Basel, Switzerland
- Tom Bickle, University of Basel, Switzerland
- Herb Boyer, University of California, San Francisco
- Jack Chirikjian, Georgetown University
- Steve Halford, Bristol University, United Kingdom
- Ken Horiuchi, The Rockefeller University
- Clyde Hutchison, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Arvydas Janulaitis, Institute of Biotechnology, Lithuania
- Stu Linn, University of Califoria, Berkeley
- Bill Linton, Promega
- Arvydas Lubys, Institute of Biotechnology, Lithuania
- Matthew Meselson, Harvard University
- Rick Morgan, New England BioLabs
- Andrzej Piekarowicz, Warsaw University, Poland
- Alfred Pingoud, Institute of Biochemistry - Giessen, Germany
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Rich Roberts, New England BioLabs
- John Rosenberg, University of Pittsburgh
- Ham Smith, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Bruno Strasser, Yale University & University of Geneva
- Geoff Wilson, New England BioLabs
OK that is 21:1 or 4.5 % women. Well, I guess this makes the meeting on sequencing look good.
Finally I checked out Plasmids: History & Biology (2014)
Organizers
Notice any patterns? The totals for these meetings come to 17 women out of 142 speakers. Or ~12 %. That is a dismal record for Cold Spring Harbor Labs and certainly does not convince me that they are trying at all to have diversity represented at their meetings. I note - I truly love many things about CSHL. This is definitely not one of them.
So then I went to "Messenger RNA: From Discovery to Synthesis and Regulation in Bacteria and Eukaryotes (2014)". Speakers are below:
Organizers:
- James Darnell, The Rockefeller University
- Adrian Krainer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Arnold Berk, University of California, Los Angeles
- Douglas Black, HHMI, University of California, Los Angeles
- George Brawerman, Tufts University School of Medicine
- Sydney Brenner, Janelia Farm Research Campus, HHMI
- Stephen Buratowski, Harvard Medical School
- Louise Chow, University of Alabama
- Juan Pablo Couso, University of Sussex, UK
- James Darnell, The Rockefeller University
- Gideon Dreyfuss, HHMI, University of Pennsylvania
- Grigorii Georgiev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
- Adrian Krainer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Tom Maniatis, Columbia University Medical Center
- James Manley, Columbia University
- Lynne Maquat, University of Rochester Medical Center
- Matthew Meselson, Harvard University
- Melissa Moore, University of Massachusetts Medical School
- Bernard Moss, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases
- Arthur Pardee, Dana Farber Cancer Institute
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Rich Roberts, New England BioLabs
- Robert Roeder, The Rockefeller University
- Mike Rosbash, Brandeis University
- Robert Schleif, John Hopkins University
- Robert Singer, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
- Nahum Sonenberg, McGill University, Montré, Quéc, Canada
- Joan Steitz, Yale University/ HHMI
- David Tollervey, Wellcome Center for Cell Biology; University of Edinburgh, UK
- Jonathan Warner, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
- James Watson, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Finally I checked out Plasmids: History & Biology (2014)
Organizers
- Dhruba Chattoraj, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD
- Stanley N. Cohen, Stanford University
- Stanley Falkow, Stanford University
- Richard Novick, New York University
- Chris Thomas, University of Birmingham, UK
- Jan Witkowski, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY
- Peter Barth, Helsby, Cheshire UK
- Susana Brom, Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México, Cuernavaca, Morelos Mexico
- Ananda Chakrabarty, University of Illinois
- Mike Chandler, Université Sabatier, Toulouse, France
- Dhruba Chattoraj, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD
- Don Clewell, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
- Stanley N. Cohen, Stanford University
- Fernando de la Cruz, Universidad de Cantabria, Spain
- R. Curtiss III, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
- Julian Davies, University of British Columbia, Canada
- Stanley Falkow, Stanford University
- Laura Frost, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
- Barbara Funnell, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Mathias Grote, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
- George A. Jacoby, Lahey Clinic, Burlington, MA
- Mark Jones, Life Sciences Foundation, San Francisco, CA
- Saleem Khan, University of Pittsburgh
- Bruce Levin, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
- John Mekalanos, Harvard Medical School
- Marc van Montagu, Ghent University, Belgium
- Richard Novick, New York University
- David Sherratt, University of Oxford, UK
- David Summers, University of Cambridge, UK
- Chris Thomas, University of Birmingham, UK
- Eva Top, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID
- Gerhart Wagner, Uppsala University, Sweden
- Michael Yarmolinsky, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda MD
- Peter Young, University of York, UK
Notice any patterns? The totals for these meetings come to 17 women out of 142 speakers. Or ~12 %. That is a dismal record for Cold Spring Harbor Labs and certainly does not convince me that they are trying at all to have diversity represented at their meetings. I note - I truly love many things about CSHL. This is definitely not one of them.
@nl_brown @phylogenomics wrote 'plenty of women who have had & still have fundamentally important roles in the field of sequencing&seqtech'— Geertje van Keulen (@DrGvanK) June 27, 2015
@DrGvanK Sadly, it is correct as the history of sequencing is male-dominated. Original phiX paper had 1/9 women authors and... (1/2)— Nigel Brown (@nl_brown) June 27, 2015
@DrGvanK (2/2) ...Gillian Air is on list. There will be 1 further replacement female/male. Not proud & could have done better on new techs— Nigel Brown (@nl_brown) June 27, 2015
@DrGvanK Would be good if they were named and could be invited to speak.— Nigel Brown (@nl_brown) June 27, 2015
@phylogenomics @DrGvanK Attempt was to represent the history of DNA sequencing. This is why I sought names we might have missed. (1/2)— Nigel Brown (@nl_brown) June 27, 2015
@phylogenomics @DrGvanK (2/2) Taking diversity over actual history is both token & revisionist. Would have loved more equality in 1900s— Nigel Brown (@nl_brown) June 27, 2015
@nl_brown @DrGvanK I don't buy it; there are always different angles on history and technology and your appears severely skewed towards men— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) June 27, 2015
@nl_brown @DrGvanK for example, though I love @gilbertjacka what role exactly did he have in history of DNA sequencing? (sorry Jack)— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) June 27, 2015
@nl_brown @DrGvanK @gilbertjacka and if the meeting includes applications of sequencing I can think of dozens of women who could be there— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) June 27, 2015
@nl_brown @DrGvanK @gilbertjacka many on speaker list who don't do sequencing technology per se; if include those could include many others— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) June 27, 2015
UPDATE 3: Made a Storify w/ some of the discussions Posted by Cold Spring Harbor, gender bias, Genomics, sequencing, YAMMM
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