Personal Statement
The primary goal of my research is to develop new optical techniques that can investigate the organization and dynamics of cellular components at spatial scales below the diffraction limit of the light microscope and to apply these techniques to answer biological and biophysical questions. Specifically, I am interested in fluorescence super-resolution techniques, single particle tracking, and hyperspectral microscopy. I also have a strong interest in developing and applying information theory and efficient computational techniques in the analysis of the large, multi-dimensional data sets that are acquired by these imaging methods.
I direct the ‘Super-resolution Technology Core’ for the New Mexico Spatiotemporal Modeling Center (STMC), an NIH center for systems biology. This resource is shared with members of the UNMCCC through a collaborative model. A sample of some of our developed and available technology are development of a single-objective light-sheet microscope that uses microfluidic chips [1]; a fast and optimal single molecule localization method that uses CUDA and GPUs [2]; a unique hyperspectral microscope for video-rate multi-color tracking [3]; and a multi-emitter fitting image processing method that uses Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo to implement a Bayesian Inference approach with code designed to run on parallel processors [4]. I also serve as the Senior Advisor of the Fluorescence Microscopy & Cell Imaging Shared Resource.