Profile:
During the period 2002-2005, as research associate in the Department of Physiology, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, I studied nonmuscle myosins in neuronal growth cone motility with a focus on myosins Va and VI in the trafficking of membraneous endosomes in neuronal growth cones of cultured chick ciliary ganglion neurons utilizing a protein knock-down strategy, chromophore-assisted laser inactivation (CALI). I also undertook the imaging of membrane rafficking in growth cones using the membrane dye, FM1-43 as well as the configuration of a custom total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRFM) optical platform for imaging of GFP-labeled myosins in living growth cones. From 2005 until 2007, I served as Manager of Imaging Operations of the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, Cellular Imaging Core, in the Department of Neurology, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Instructor of Neurology with Harvard Medical School. My experiences spans confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM), two-photon microscopy, time-lapse confocal and 3D microscopy, fluorescence recovery after photo-bleaching (FRAP), fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), laser microdissection of cellular cytoskeletal elements (actin filaments and microtubules) using the two-photon laser, conventional digital epifluorescence microscopy, and differential interference contrast microscopy (DIC). From 2007 until 2009, I was Associate Research in Cardiology in the Department of Cardiology at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Instructor of Pediatrics with Harvard Medical School. I conducted research on sperm cell biology in the laboratory of Dr. David Clapham. During this time I tested methods for expressing genes in mature mouse sperm cells including electroporation and lipophilic transfection methods, with some success in expressing GFP variants. I also conducted preliminary tests for a role of p53 in sperm cell function through over-expression of p53. Since 2009 I have been Associate (and then Co-) Director and Senior Staff Scientist (and then Senior Research Laboratory Manager) at the Ragon Institute for MGH, MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston and responsible for the microscopy section of the Ragon Institute Imaging Core facility.
Talk title:
Navigating Immune Cell Dynamics at the Tissue Level: A Multi-modal Approach
Abstract:
In immunology, flow cytometry of human blood samples typically employs 15 to 30 markers per cell. There is thus a necessity for characterizing immune cell populations and their dynamics in tissue. However, examination tissue has been limited in terms of the number of markers one can interrogate at the single cell level using conventional epifluorescence or confocal microscopy approaches. In this presentation, various approaches for multiplexing fluorescent markers in tissue will be described utilizing a high-throughput slide scanning platform (TissueFAXS by TissueGnostics USA) to demonstrate the ease with which one may examine far more than the standard four or five fluorophores at the single cell level. Applications for such approaches will be illustrated for immune cell characterization in the context of HIV and COVID-19, including cell-to-cell interactions and dynamics in tissues in a highly regional and quantitative manner.