Sixteen years ago, the Young Embryologist Network (YEN) conference was started to provide a platform for early-career researchers in Developmental Biology to present their work to a supportive audience of peers. Run by young researchers for young researchers, YEN has since grown to a global conference with 300 attendees in over 30 countries.

Here, PhD student Irina Balaguer Balsells shares her experience of chairing the YEN2024 conference held at The Francis Crick Institute, with Toby Andrews, a postdoctoral fellow at The Crick. The YEN2024 committee also included fellow MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) students Ferran Garcia Llagostera, Christos Kalaitzis and Yi Xuan Low. 

“Our main goals for this edition of YEN were to extend its reach to a global audience and broaden the network of young embryologists. To ensure inclusivity and maximise our reach, we maintained the hybrid format of the conference and recruited representatives from universities and institutes worldwide to promote YEN and create watch parties for participants to gather and engage. With the generous support of our sponsors, we were able to award 16 travel grants to students and researchers across Europe, our greatest number yet. YEN’s ethos has always been accessibility. I hope that as YEN expands, we will be afforded further opportunities to build on the YEN ideology by making it accessible to developmental biologists beyond the UK and Europe.”

The Scientific Perspective sessions are also integral to the conference. Past themes for these sessions have included ‘Diversity and Inclusion’, ‘Disability in Science’, and career perspectives from leading researchers. This year, we chose the theme ‘Science in Society’ to discuss research’s social, ethical, and legal impacts. The field of developmental biology is rapidly progressing. With the steadfast emergence of new approaches to generating synthetic embryos in the lab, we must consider the ethical questions such technologies raise. Therefore, we invited science communicators, policy advisors and researchers to spotlight their knowledge and perspectives on this subject. These speakers included Naomi Morris (The Francis Crick. Institute), Steve Crabtree (The Science Unit, BBC Studios) and John Wallingford (University of Texas at Austin). If I were to leave everyone with one message from these talks, it is that open trans-disciplinary discussion on the ethical debates of developmental research is what will allow us to promote public understanding and scientifically grounded research guidelines. In the coming years, more than ever, our focus should be shaping a more moral and societally conscious science. 

This year, we also had an incredible line-up of PhD students and junior postdocs presenting their research in short talks and posters. Their contributions were the backbone of YEN24. Alongside the short talks and posters, we had longer talks from three invited speakers: Aydan Bulut-Karslioglu (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics), Kristian Franze (University of Cambridge) and our keynote speaker, Pavel Tomancak (Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics; Central European Institute of Technology), who delivered the “Sammy Lee Memorial Lecture”. 

Chairing YEN has been a tremendous honour. It is a conference that is very near to my heart as it was the first conference I attended. The YEN community is incredibly welcoming, and it allows researchers as early on in their career as their Masters to share their work, network, and interact with peers in the field. I genuinely believe in its ethos of inclusivity and accessibility and, therefore, was proud to contribute to this year’s iteration and to try to build upon what previous chairs have done. I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the YEN24 committee and all the sponsors who have made this year’s YEN a resounding success (The Company of Biologists, REGEN, Imperial College London, The Crick Partner Networking Fund, The Genetics Society, The Society for Reproduction and Fertility and 10X Genomics). Follow us on X @YEN_community and on our website for updates on YEN25.”