One of the interesting career paths outlined at the ‘Where next after EMBL’ event was that of former EMBL predoc Pavel Tomancak, now a group leader at the MPI for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden. He has gained experience in three very different fields during his academic career. “Thanks to the freedom in Gerry Rubin’s lab at Berkeley, where I was a postdoc, I was able to move from the bench to computational biology” he explains. “I made a final transfer to image analysis at MPI-CBG because it is so important – most primary data in biology are images.”

As part of his work there, Pavel generated the Genomic Fosmid Library, which covers 90% of genes in the Drosophila genome. He also promotes a new image analysis open source project called Fiji (Fiji Is Just ImageJ). Though a world away from the PhD he completed in Anne Ephrussi’s lab at EMBL on the genes involved in the establishment of the Drosophila oocyte polarity, he recalls his early days here with appreciation for the great start to his scientific life. “I was one of the first eastern European students to be accepted at EMBL, and I was known as ‘Skodaman’,” recalls Pavel, who comes from the Czech Republic. “It’s when you leave that you realise there are people worldwide benefiting both professionally and personally from the EMBL networks they build. As soon as I got off the plane in California when I started my postdoc I met three people from EMBL! It makes you feel at home all over the world.”

At MPI-CBG, though, he’s reminded of the old days all the time – the institute is known as the ‘Dresden model’, inspired by EMBL, and there are no fewer than 29 EMBL alumni currently working there. “The two share many principles: independence for young groups, competitive packages, locations in nice cities, excellent PhD programmes and state-of-the-art facilities – and, of course, the parties,” Pavel says. “EMBL has changed the culture of science in Europe by exporting such ideas.”