The Microscopists

#19 — Prepare for some serious houseplant envy in this episode of The Microscopists, as we talk to the multi-talented Jennifer Waters ( @JenCWaters ), Director of the Nikon Imaging Center at Harvard Medical School . As well as directing the core facility and creating the successful Microcourses YouTube channel, Jennifer runs the Quantitative Imaging course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory . She al...

#18 — You may know Anne Carpenter best as the brains behind the CellProfiler™ image analysis software, but today we learn more about what makes Anne tick, how she dealt with imposter syndrome, the challenges of setting up a lab and starting a family simultaneously, and her love of baking. We’ll learn more about Anne’s move from life sciences to computer science, how her Valentine’s Day roses ended...

#17 — There’s no question that Ernst H. K. Stelzer is a key figure in the world of high-resolution fluorescence microscopy, but did you know that his love of physics stemmed from a desire to build a time machine? In this down-to-earth chat with the pioneer of confocal 4Pi fluorescence microscopy, we’ll discuss why scientists need to be able to take risks in their research, how Ernst also worries a...

In memory of Spencer Shorte. #16 — Spencer Shorte was the Chief Scientific Officer of Institut Pasteur Korea , the creator of the Imagopol , and the founder of the core facility software company Stratocore . When he spoke to us, we learned about the globetrotting that led Spencer to Korea, the challenges that he has faced in his career, and his favorite publication. We got to know Spencer on a mor...

#15 — Along with becoming a Dame, Ottoline Leyser also recently became Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a UK body dedicated to building a thriving, inclusive research and innovation system. In this informal discussion, Ottoline explains what the UKRI does and shows us just why she’s a perfect fit. Discussing her career move, we find out if she has any regrets about leaving the...

#14 — You may feel you know Rita Strack (Senior Editor at Nature Methods ) already if you follow her engaging and friendly twitter feed ( @rita_strack ). But here we delve deeper to uncover her very successful academic career involving developing fluorescent proteins and reporters, her love of horses and a passion for Korean food. We find out the type of abuse that editors sometimes face, and how...

#13 — You may know Rainer Heintzmann ( Friedrich Schiller University Jena ) as one of the pioneers of structured illumination microscopy (SIM) but here we delve more into the man behind the science, where we discover a breath of interests including gliding, skiing, dancing and 3D printing. Rainer’s undergraduate studies may have taken him a lengthy 6 years to complete, yet he transitioned from PhD...

#12 — This episode of The Microscopists was recorded LIVE with a very special guest - Eric Betzig ! We already know so much about Eric, but I hope that our chat will reveal more about the man behind the many ingenious contributions to the world of microscopy, life sciences, and science in general. While Eric is well known for receiving the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Stefan Hell and...

#11 — Petra is a dedicated high flyer that simply loves her work (and her music, for which there is little she cannot play to concert level!). We chat about how she was given very little PhD supervision but encouraged to simply explore. We also discuss her time in the USA before returning to Germany where she has become a Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry . Not only high flying...

#10 — From Cajal to Google, networks to solve networks! Jeff is another person who simply does not stop innovating and exploiting new technology. In this podcast, he talks about the very first time he saw the Brainbow image, in a step by step manner that simply blew him away, through to his past inspirations and today’s motivations. New technologies come with larger and larger data sets, and he ch...

#9 — What a time to chat with an immunologist! It makes a change to hear Dan talking about himself, how he developed his career, including the real motivation to becoming a Professor at Imperial at such a young age. Starting out as a Physicist, Dan made a remarkable and fast switch in careers to which he attributes much of his success. Sometimes a passion coupled with early naivety can be the perf...

#8 — Lucy Collinson has been at the forefront of 3D volume and correlated electron microscopy since setting up the internationally renowned facilities at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute and now the Francis Crick Institute . In this episode, Peter O’Toole discusses not only Lucy being a leading light in her field and her motivations, but uncovers some of Lucy’s more obscure passion...

#7 — Young, successful and still so disarming. In this episode, Hari Shroff reveals what it was like to work in the exciting area of Super-Resolution microscopy during its infancy, and discusses working in the early days of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus. Hari discusses his latest work and the efforts that go behind such a high impact publication while also talk...

#6 — It would be fair to say that Scott Fraser has influenced the microscopy community more than most. As the person behind the Meta detector, he made a massive impact on the microscopy community and is now seeing these adaptations being adopted in other fields again. But how did Scott find himself in such a position? It appears as though his coffee machine is the answer behind most inventions! Th...

#5 — There’s no doubt that Ricardo ’s career so far has been stellar. He’s moved up the career ladder at lightning speed, starting his own group in 2013, following only a brief postdoc, to holding a professorial position and starting another lab at IGC . This is especially impressive given that his original BSc was in physics! In this episode, Ricardo reveals how imposter syndrome can affect anyon...

#4 — Ever wonder how people end up working in a core facility? You are about to find out. In this show, Peter O’Toole welcomes Alison North from The Rockefeller University in New York and Kurt Anderson from The Francis Crick Institute in London. Alison, originally from the UK, now works in the USA, while Kurt is from the USA but now works in the UK. So there’s an interesting dynamic to this interv...

#3 — In this latest episode, Peter O’Toole chats to Jason Swedlow of The University of Dundee , whose open-source tools are revolutionising microscopy. While Peter has known Jason for many years, this was a great opportunity to find out more about Jason on a personal level including his decision to stop competitive road cycling through to his travels around the world. Taking a rest from being a le...

#2 — Step into a brief history of how the confocal microscope came to be! Peter O’Toole chats with one of the pioneers of the confocal microscope - Tony Wilson from the University of Oxford . Wearing his cowboy hat and boots throughout the interview, Tony talks about his passion for cattle, his Jaguar and Yorkshire cricket, and how finding life scientists to try this ‘new’ technique was not as sim...

#1 — Join this informal chat between Peter O’Toole and Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz of The Howard Hughes Medical Institute . Beyond kayaking to work and a passion for plants, Jennifer explains how she became interested in Biology from her time teaching in Africa, and how she was fortunate enough in her early career to work alongside some of the true giants of cell biology. Very few cell biologists...