You must be a NESM member in order to register for this meeting. While registering, you may be prompted to renew your NESM membership. If the cost for renewing your membership is more than the cost for one year, please send an email to info@nesmicroscopy.org before you renew and register, and we can zero the outstanding balance from previous years.
You are invited to the New England Society for Microscopy's Annual Spring Workshop & Symposium at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts! The meeting will be held over two days - Thursday, May 11th and Friday, May 12th. On Thursday, May 11th, we will have a workshop on Napari-Micromanager in the afternoon, and a Poster Session and Beer+Wine Networking Reception in the early evening. Friday, May 12th, will consist of a day-long Symposium featuring five technical talks, four 10-minute "lightning" talks, and an exhibiting vendor session, with lunch provided. Our invited speakers are Amy Moser (NSF-EAR Postdoctoral Fellow MIT), Ming Su (Northeastern University), Charles Liberman (Havard Medical School),
Kamil Ekinci (Boston University), and Kyle DeMarr (UC Berkeley, MBL). Check the NESM website for more information on speakers, titles, and abstracts as it becomes available.
We are looking forward to seeing everyone in-person this year!
We encourage everybody (especially trainees) to present your cool science as a poster at Thursday's beer+wine networking reception. Best poster will receive a Poster Prize!
When arriving at MBL, please check in at the Swope Center Front Desk to receive a parking pass. They will direct you to an available parking lot at that time.
All locations are in the Swope Center located at 5 North Street.
The Workshop and Symposium will be located in the Megis Room in the Swope Center.
Thursday Poster Session and Networking Reception will be in the Swope Private Dining Room
Friday Lunch will be provided in the Main Dining Room, Swope Center.
MBL map
Thursday, May 11th - Day One
Workshop, Megis Room, Swope Center:
Analysis Alongside Acquisition with Napari-Micromanager (Python)
Instructed by: Ian Hunt-Isaak
For detailed description, see below.
Schedule:
1:00 PM – Welcoming Remarks
1:10 PM – Workshop Part I
2:30 PM – Afternoon Coffee Break
3:00 PM – Workshop Part II
5:00 PM – Poster Session and Beer+Wine Networking Reception
Swope Private Dining Room
7:00 PM – Closing
Symposium Schedule, May 12th
Megis room, Swope Center
9:00 AM – Registration and Breakfast
9:50 AM –Welcome by Stephan Kramer, NESM President
10:00 AM – Amy C. Moser (NSF-EAR Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT)
How old are broken rocks? Dating geologic deformation with the mineral titanite
10:40 AM – Ming Su (Northeastern University)
Encapsulated phase change nanoparticles for enhanced cooling, barcoding and biosensing
11:20 AM – Coffee Break
11:30 AM- Vendor Session
12:30 PM - Break for lunch
Main Dining Room
1:30 PM - Lightning talks
1:30 PM - Erin Deans (Brandeis University)
Studying a Novel Binding Site Between ER Molecular Chaperones BiP and Grp94 with Single Molecule FRET
1:40 PM- Rudolf Oldenbourg and Amitabh Verma (MBL)
Light Field Microscopy and napari-LF
1:50 PM Austin Akey (Harvard CNS)
Low Energy Electron Microscopy for Surface Science
2:00 PM Robert Brandom (Bruker)
2:10 PM - Charles Liberman (Harvard Medical School)
Cochlear neurodegeneration in noise-induced and age-related hearing loss
2:50 PM – Afternoon Coffee Break
3:10 PM - Kamil Ekinci (Boston University)
Nanomechanical Devices: Introduction, Fundamentals, and Applications
3:50 PM - Kyle DeMarr (UC Berkeley, MBL)
Transgenic-Free Live Imaging as a Tool to Understand the Evolution of Cell Shape Change in Butterfly Scales
4:30 PM - Closing Remarks
Workshop details:
Title: Analysis Alongside Acquisition with Napari-Micromanager (Python)
Instructed by: Ian Hunt-Isaak
Description:
Napari-Micromanager integrates microscope image acquisition with the napari image viewer[1]. This enables users to leverage the ecosystem of Python imaging analysis tools to easily customize the data acquisition process and analyze data as it is captured. In this workshop you will first be guided through installing and using Napari-Micromanager, and how to transition from MicroManager. Then we will demonstrate the power of combining the acquisition and analysis with on the fly deep learning. Finally workshop attendees will build their own extension enabling a live display of signal to noise ratio in fluorescence images based on user selected regions of the image.
[1] napari.org - napari is a fast, interactive, multi-dimensional image viewer for Python. It’s designed for browsing, annotating, and analyzing large multi-dimensional images
Abstract and Bios
Amy Moser
NSF Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
How old are broken rocks? Dating geologic deformation with the mineral titanite
The ability to determine the age of rocks and minerals (i.e., “dating” or “geochronology”) is a cornerstone of geologic research. Early work in geochronology dated whole rocks and minerals, which limited the detail that could be gleaned from geologic datasets. More recently, the advent of in situ dating techniques, such as laser-ablation and secondary ion mass spectrometry, has transformed the geochronology research community. By combining microscopy with in situ dating methods, geochronologists can directly date geologic events that could not be dated using whole-rock and whole-mineral techniques. Here, I present a new application of these microscopic and in situ geochronology methods to dating deformation (when rocks “break”) with the mineral titanite. The workflow integrates optical and electron microscopy techniques, including electron backscatter diffraction and electron probe microanalysis, to first characterize and quantify the textures of the mineral at the microscale. These microscopy data are then used to target the location of in situ geochronologic analyses, which then reveal the timing or age of deformation. Applications of this new tool to natural rocks demonstrate that it is useful for dating deformation in locations where the deformation age has hereto been difficult to constrain
Ming Su
Department of Chemical Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115
Email: m.su@northeastern.edu
Encapsulated phase change nanoparticles for enhanced cooling, barcoding and biosensing
Nanomaterials are studied for their electronic, magnetic, mechanical and chemical properties. We have studied the unique thermal properties of nanoscale phase change materials, i.e., nano-PCMs. This group of materials may have any chemical compositions, as long as there is a solid-liquid phase transition when the temperature is changed. We have designed and made a number of nano-PCMs of metallic and organic materials based on their large latent heats of fusion and composition-dependent melting points. These nano-PCMs have been used to solve challenging engineering issues such as heat transfer enhancement of fluids and thermal runaway prevention of catalytic reactors, biological issues such as multiplexed biomarker detection, and sustainability issues such as anti-counterfeiting with covert thermal barcodes that can be added into objects. In particular, we have explored the solid-to-liquid phase transition of metallic nanoparticles encapsulated in non-melting shells using transmission electron microscopy coupled with an in-situ heating capability.
Bio
Prof. Ming Su received his PhD from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. He is currently a full professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University. He has gained experience in nanomaterials, microscopy and microanalysis, nanomedicines and biomedical technologies. He has pioneered the uses of encapsulated phase change nanoparticles to enhance heat transfer of fluids, to detect multiple cancer biomarkers and to label objects as covert barcodes. He has received many prestigious awards such as a Faculty Early Career Development Award from National Science Foundation (NSF), a Concept Award from Department of Defense (DOD), a Director’s New Innovator Award from National Institute of Health (NIH), a Doctoral New Investigator from American Chemical Society (ACS), and a Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), among others. As a graduate student (some twenty years ago), he has received a distinguished scholar award from Microbeam Analysis Society of America.
M. Charles Liberman
Eaton-Peabody Laboratories, Mass. Eye and Ear
Department of Otolaryngology, Harvard Medical School
Cochlear neurodegeneration in noise-induced and age-related hearing loss
A longstanding dogma in auditory neuroscience was that the sensory cells of the inner ear were the most vulnerable elements in both noise-induced and age-related hearing loss, and that the auditory-nerve fibers connecting them to the brain degenerated if and only if the sensory cells died first. We recently showed, first in animal models and then in human autopsy material, that it is actually the synaptic connections between the auditory-nerve fibers and sensory cells that degenerate first. This synaptopathy can silence more than 50% of the neurons before there is any loss of sensory cells. Even this massive neurodegeneration has little effect on the audiogram, the gold standard hearing test. However, it causes the problems hearing in a noisy environment that are a major complaint of the hearing impaired; thus, the term “hidden hearing loss” has been used to describe the phenomenon. This talk will summarize the histopathological analyses that formed the bases for these discoveries, first using confocal microscopy of cochleas immunostained for pre- and post- synaptic markers, and, more recently, by serial-section ultrastructural analysis using FIB-SEM and machine-learning driven morphometric analysis.
Research supported by a grant from the NIDCD (R01 DC 000188).
Bio
M. Charles Liberman, Ph.D. is the Schuknecht Professor of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery at the Harvard Medical School and the Former Director of the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear (1996 – 2022). Dr. Liberman received his B.A. in Biology from Harvard College in 1972 and his Ph.D. in Physiology from Harvard Medical School in 1976. He has been on the faculty at Harvard since 1979, has published over 200 papers on a variety of topics in auditory neuroscience and is the recipient of the Award of Merit from the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, the Carhart Award from the American Auditory Society and Bekesy Silver Medal from the Acoustical Society of America. His research interests include 1) coding of acoustic stimuli as neural responses in the auditory periphery, 2) efferent feedback control of the auditory periphery, 3) mechanisms underlying noise-induced and age-related hearing loss, 4) the signaling pathways mediating nerve survival in the inner ear and 5) application of cell- and drug-based therapies to the repair of a damaged inner ear.
Kamil Ekinci
Title:
Nanomechanical Devices: Introduction, Fundamentals, and Applications
Abstract:
Mechanical devices have been used for sensitive measurements of physical quantities, such as mass, charge, current and pressure, for several centuries now. With the emergence of nanotechnology, the trend is to push the linear dimensions of mechanical devices into the submicron. These resulting nanoscale mechanical devices are being used in current research as tools for observing quantum effects, for probing biological entities, for detecting single molecules, and for measuring molecular-scale forces. In this talk, I will provide a balanced introduction to nanoscale mechanical devices by explaining the basic principles of mechanical detection, by mentioning some applications, and by discussing some challenges. I will also talk about recent results from my lab on fundamental fluid dynamics and fluctuations.
Bio:
Kamil Ekinci is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics from Brown University. After his Ph.D., Ekinci performed postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology. In 2002, he joined the faculty of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Boston University. From 2008-2009, Ekinci was a Visiting Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg at the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST). Ekinci's research focuses on physical and biological phenomena at the nanometer length scales. He is also engaged in developing nanoscale devices and ultrasensitive measurement techniques for a variety of applications in biotechnology. He received an NSF CAREER award and was a Boston University College of Engineering Distinguished Faculty Fellow.
Kyle DeMarr (Marine Biological Laboratory)
Transgenic-Free Live Imaging as a Tool to Understand the Evolution of Cell Shape Change in Butterfly Scales
Kyle A. DeMarr1,2, Carlos Patino-Descovich5, Ryan Null1, Julian Kimura4, Nipam Patel2,3
1University of California, Berkeley, USA ; 2Marine Biological Laboratory, USA; 3University of Chicago, USA; 4Harvard University, USA; 5University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
To employ an evolutionary approach in the study of development, it is necessary to develop versatile techniques which can be applied to entire clades of organisms. To this end, we have created species-agnostic protocols to stain insect wings with live cell dyes with the intention to understand principles of cytoskeletal organization across developing scale and bristle cells. Scales and bristles are chitinous projections that adorn arthropod exoskeletons and which hold essential roles in chemo- and mechanosensation. Each scale or bristle forms from a single cell that secretes the mature cuticle; therefore, these single cells are quite large, structurally complex, and metabolically active. Using confocal and STED microscopy, we track actin and microtubule organization across intra- and interspecific scale variation in moths and butterflies to divine underlying principles determining cell shape. In particular, we determine coordination of these two cytoskeletal polymers correlates with more cylindrical scales and evoke this observation in a proposed mechanism for the evolution of transparency in several butterfly genera.
Kyle A. DeMarr received his B.S. in Entomology from Cornell University in 2016 and is currently a graduate candidate in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley working in the lab of Dr. Nipam Patel at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts. Mixing approaches from developmental, cell, and evolutionary biology, Kyle uses microscopy in his research to determine how individual cells on insect wings, in particular those of butterflies and moths, coordinate their cytoskeleton to give rise to a variety of colors and shapes. He is an unabashed fan of STED and Airyscan imaging, but his first love was SEM/TEM.
