The retreat began on Friday afternoon with scientific talks by students and postdocs. Roughly organized into themes, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, gene expression, host defense and immunity, and virology, the talks were varied and interesting and were followed by lively question and answer sessions. Friday evening was reserved for a poster session with 26 trainees presenting their research. Student and postdoc presentations continued on Saturday morning. Faculty judges of the oral and poster presentations uniformly agreed that this was a very difficult assignment due to the overall high quality of both talks and posters.

Before breaking for lunch on Saturday, the department’s own Dr. Peter Prevelige swapped his structural virology hat for that of photographer extraordinaire and took the retreat group photo. After lunch, faculty and trainees joined in a roundtable discussion about advanced courses in the department of microbiology. Many positive suggestions for possible courses, including an advanced virology course and a new course on the microbiome, came from the discussion.

The highlight of the retreat was the Saturday evening talk by keynote speaker Dr. William R. Jacobs, Jr. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, located in the Bronx borough of New York City. Bill is an alumnus of the UAB Department of Microbiology, having received his Ph.D. in molecular cell biology in 1985. He studied Mycobacterium leprae, the causative agent of leprosy, while in the laboratories of Drs. Roy Curtiss III and Josephine Clark-Curtiss. After receiving his Ph.D., he accepted a postdoctoral position in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine with Dr. Barry Bloom, studying Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Bill established his own laboratory at Einstein in 1987. His contributions to this field have been enormous and well recognized. He has been a Howard Hughes Investigator since 1990, and in 2013 he was elected to the US National Academy of Science. In his talk at the retreat, Bill delighted the audience with highlights of his scientific discoveries, including the “Bronx bomber,” a highly virulent bacteriophage, lytic for certain mycobacteria, which he isolated from soil in his backyard in the Bronx and which has been instrumental for genetic analysis of these organisms. His talk was insightful, entertaining and even had an audience participation component. It was in the true sense of an overused word, awesome.

The retreat concluded on Sunday morning with three interesting talks by departmental faculty members, Drs. Dave Bedwell, Hui Hu (a new recruit to the department) and Jan Novak. This was followed by the awards ceremony with closing remarks by department chair, Dr. Fran Lund, during which she announced that our department had received the UAB Dean’s Award for Excellence.