Stereology Expert Prof. Mark West Teaches Workshop in Woods Hole Next Week

Stereology has many applications from counting cells in the brains of birds at the Animal Cognition Lab at Luther College in Iowa, to estimating cell populations in rat models of dementia in Newfoundland, or counting cells in the brain stems of rats with Huntington’s disease across the ocean in the Netherlands.

Scientists around the world use stereology to study a range of different types of diseases and disorders, and are finding that this sophisticated research method is the most efficient and effective way to quantitatively analyze the size, shape, and number of objects in biological tissue.

Next week, Dr. Mark West, a professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, teaches a “NeuroStereology Workshop” at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. A stereology expert and pioneer for nearly four decades, Dr. West is the most cited author of scientific papers on the application of modern stereological methods to the nervous system.

“The unique aspect of the new design-based stereology is that, unlike previously available methods, these methods involve no prerequisite information about the structural features being quantified, and emphasize the importance of estimates of total quantities such as number, length, surface, and volume,” Dr. West told us last year in an interview about his book Basic Stereology For Biologists and Neuroscientists (2012, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press).

The course takes place Saturday, March 16 – Thursday, March 21 and focuses on teaching students how to design, supervise, and critically evaluate unbiased stereological studies of the nervous system.

Learn more about the workshop at Neurostereology.info.

Do you use stereology in your research? We’d love to know what you’re studying. Tell us in the comments section.

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