About

Hi! I am an Advanced Biosystems Specialist for Nikon Instruments. My role is to provide consultative sales for Nikon’s confocal microscopy systems for bioscience research in the upper Midwest of the US.

My formal training is in physical chemistry and my primary research interests are in live cell light microscopy, data analysis & visualization, and cellular biophysics. I focus on designing microscopy experiments and analysis to obtain answers to cellular biophysical questions. I spend my time writing my own analysis code (Matlab and R) to handle image processing, data analysis, and data visualization tasks and building and tweaking microscopy setups to obtain the desired images. I’ve worked with widefield epifluorescence, laser-scanning and spinning disk confocal, and two-photon microscopies. I have experience with home-built laser-scanning two-photon and confocal instruments that were operated with custom software.

Previously, I was a Field Applications Scientist for the BioTek - after Agilent’s acquistion of BioTek the Agilent BioTek - microscopy product line of widefield and confocal automated imagers. Before joining industry, I was a biophysics postdoc at the University of Chicago and a graduate student at the University of North Carolina.

Scientifically, I’m interested in transport inside living cells. As a graduate student, I studied diffusion and binding of DNA repair and RNA polymerase enzymes inside the polytene nuclei of Drosophila melanogaster larva. As a postdoc, I’ve studied insulin vesicle transport dynamics inside cultured $\beta$-cells.

As part of my research, I write software for data analysis. For my post-doc at University of Chicago, I developed an app for visualization of large (1,000+ trajectories) data sets of single particle tracking using the Shiny package in R. The app allows for selective on-the-fly filtering of the data set and to visualize trajectories with the corresponding mean squared displacement. You can try out the app on synthetic data yourself or view the code. Other examples include Matlab programs that detect bright regions of cells or process and fit fluorescence recovery after photobleaching data. I also write GUIs to assist in using microscopes. For example, Matlab GUIs that control lasers in a laser launch for a spinning disk confocal microscope or syringe pumps for microfluidic devices on microscopes.

I obtained my Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and my B.S. in both Chemistry and Biology from Alderson Broaddus University in West Virginia. I’m originally from West Virginia and follow WVU sports and enjoy visiting those West Virginia hills when time allows. In my free time I enjoy playing board games, reading both fiction and nonfiction, and birding. I also practice my programing skills on small game projects. My completed small game project, Kästchenspiel, is on Github.