Join NESM for our annual Fall Meeting on Thursday, September 19th at Oxford Instruments! The meeting will consist of facility tours, dinner, and two talks. Hope to see you there!
**PARKING: Free Parking will be available in the back of the building. Please see map at end of this post.**
Meeting Schedule
5:00pm - 6:00 Registration and tours
6:00pm - 6:50pm Dinner
6:50pm - 7:00pm Introductory remarks
7:00pm - 7:35pm Current challenges for nanomechanical measurements with atomic force microscopy
Dalia Yablon, Ph.D., SurfaceChar LLC
7:35pm - 8:10pm The Road to the Whole Mouse Brain Connectome?
Richard Schalek, Harvard University
8:10pm - 8:20pm Closing
Abstracts and Speaker Bios
Dalia Yablon, Ph.D., SurfaceChar LLC
Current challenges for nanomechanical measurements with atomic force microscopy
Although well-known for topography measurements, AFM truly excels at nanomechanical measurements due to the inherent mechanical interaction between the tip and sample in its operation. Since its invention, over a dozen mechanical modes have been invented to probe a variety of properties such as: modulus, adhesion, viscoelasticity, friction, and dissipation. Despite significant progress since the early days, AFM still struggles with aspects of obtaining accurate, quantitative nanomechanical measurements. Current AFM-based nanomechanical methodologies have integrated recent hardware and software developments including acquisition speed, calibration methods, multifrequency methods, and modeling capabilities. Significant challenges remain and still need to be addressed including modeling limitations, remaining instrumentation uncertainties, and frequency space comparison for viscoelastic properties.
Biography
Dalia Yablon is the founder of SurfaceChar, an AFM and nanoindentation based measurement and consulting company in the Greater Boston area since 2013. She spent over a decade developing and leading scanning probe microscopy research at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering and edited a book on “SPM in Industrial Applications” from Wiley Publishing. Dalia holds an A.B. in Chemistry from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Columbia University.
Richard Schalek, Harvard University
The Road to the Whole Mouse Brain Connectome?
“…the most powerful computer in the world isn’t nearly as intuitive as the one we’re born with. So, there is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked.” —President B. Obama, 2013, announcing the NIH BRAIN Initiative.
These words and the subsequent NIH directives provided the neuroscience community with goals for the next 10 years. The second phase of the program, Brain 2.0, has designated several large-scale projects --involving teams of scientists-- that if completed would have unprecedented impact and propel advances in all areas of neuroscience. One of the five transformative projects announced has a goal to “…comprehensively map the entire mouse brain, enabling study of brain circuitry from synapses to coordinated function and behavior.” Though the program is still in the recommendation phase and details of funding have not been announced, various groups around the world are working to help define the challenges and possible solutions to a variety of technical and scientific questions.
One natural question is “Why the whole mouse brain connectome and not a human brain connectome?”. The answer to this question is more pragmatic than scientific. In this case, using a 480 nm3 voxel (4 nm x 4nm x 30 nm) a typical human brain having a volume of ~1300 cm3 would require ~2.5 zettabytes of storage space. A rough estimate of the world’s total data storage capacity is about 0.800 zettabytes. On the other hand, a mouse brain has a volume ~1100 mm3 and would only require ~ 2.5 exabytes of storage space. Of course, storage is only one of the multitude of problems. For instance, how do you stain an entire mouse brain?; how do you cut ~350,000, 30 nm thick sections?; how do you image these sections?; how is the data managed and curated?; and how is the image data aligned and segmented?
Currently there are no concrete answers to these questions. This talk will cover these challenges and possible solutions, while describing some of the sample preparation, sectioning and imaging techniques being developed. Strategies for whole-brain staining and imaging using a 61-beam scanning electron microscope will be discussed.
Biography
Richard Schalek a Research Associate in Prof. Jeffery Lichtman’s laboratory in the Center for Brain Science. For the past 25 years, he has worked in the field of microscopy utilizing a variety of imaging modalities. Richard has a B.S. and M.S. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Materials Science. Richard’s responsibilities center around developing and improving a high-volume high-throughput imaging pipeline for neural connectomics research. His research includes new sample preparation procedures, understanding sectioning mechanics, and the automation of serial electron microscopy imaging. Richard has been active in local microscopy societies for many years. He has served as Newsletter Editor and President for the Michigan Microscopy and Microanalysis Society, and Treasurer and President for the New England Society for Microscopy.
Travel and Parking
Address:
300 Baker Avenue, Suite 150, Concord, MA 01742
Google maps link
Map for parking location and entrance for cafeteria:
Oxford_Instruments_Map.jpg
