I am a microscopist with a background in neuronal cell biology. My history with the MBL started back in 2011 when I was a summer undergraduate researcher working in the lab of Joe DeGiorgis, studying axonal transport in squid axoplasm. I then stuck around full-time for awhile as an electron microscopy technician in Jen Morgan’s lab in the Bell Center, investigating the role of the Parkinson’s Disease-associated protein alpha synuclein on synaptic ultrastructure in lamprey spinal synapses. I left the MBL in 2014 to start my PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology in Avital Rodal’s lab at Brandeis University. I moved from electrons to photons and spent my time using whatever types of light microscopy I could get my hands on to ask how endosomal cargos are sorted in the Drosophila larval neuromuscular junction. During my PhD I confirmed what I had already suspected since my time at the MBL – while I thought my project was interesting, my real passion was for the microscopes. After I graduated, I became an Advanced Microscopy Fellow at the Nikon Imaging Center at Harvard Medical School with Jennifer Waters. It’s a unique type of postdoctoral program that is designed to train people to work in a large, multi-user core microscopy facility and help scientists from diverse disciplines design and implement imaging experiments.
I returned to the MBL in September 2023, as a staff scientist jointly between Abhishek Kumar’s lab and the Patel lab, to support the imaging innovation initiative at the MBL by helping scientists make use of custom-build, specialized microscopes and working to design tools, protocols and pipelines for advanced imaging, particularly using emerging model organisms.