On February 25th, 2014, the Spring meeting was held the Cabot Corporation headquarters in Billerica, MA starting at 5:30pm. The evening started with members socializing over a delicious meal generously provided by Cabot, before the Welcome address from NESM President Blair Rossetti. Dr. Toivo Kodas from Cabot Corporation spoke first and began by reminding us that Francis A. Heckman, first president of NESM in 1967 (then the New England Society for Electron Microscopy), was a microscopist at Cabot. He then proceeded with a brief history of Cabot Corporation, a wonderful explanation of the types of materials that Cabot makes and the types of applications for which Cabot particles are used. Next, Dr. Bjoern Schimmoeller gave a more detailed but very accessible talk about the different processes used to generate different types of particles, a few recent advances they have made in particle design and how they use electron microscopy for product evaluation and R&D. He finished with a great classic scientific story about successfully troubleshooting unexpected results using a non-standard method—in this case, imaging fused silica particles by TEM instead of SEM—with beautiful images.
Dr. Shalin Mehta of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA then spoke about his work with fluorescence anisotropy microscopy. After an introduction to polarized light with a fun demonstration, a brief history of polarized light in biological research and at the MBL and an introduction to fluorescence polarization he went into more detail about how this group uses fluorescence anisotropy to measure the orientation of aligned fibers within fixed and live cells. Dr. Mehta showed stunning images of actin fiber alignment in mammalian HeLa cells, and septin alignment during mitosis in the budding yeast. He also touched on work by Tomomi Tani which uses fluorophore tumbling to calculate structure. He ended by talking about his group’s newest endeavor into light field microscopy, using a lenslet array to collect three dimensional data within a single image.
Wendy Salmon
Biological Sciences Director
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