Jennifer Waters

Last updated

Jennifer Waters
Alma mater UNC-Chapel Hill (PhD),
University at Albany, SUNY (BSc)
Known forMicroscopy, Teaching
Scientific career
Fields Microscopy,
Cell Biology
Institutions Harvard Medical School,
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
Wake Forest University
Academic advisorsEdward D. Salmon
Website nic.med.harvard.edu

Jennifer Waters is an American scientist who is a Lecturer on Cell Biology, the Director of the Core for Imaging Technology & Education [1] (CITE; formally the NIC) and the Director of the Cell Biology Microscopy Facility at Harvard Medical School. [2] She is an imaging expert and educator [3] whose efforts to educate life scientists about microscopy and to systemize the education of microscopists in microscopy facilities serve as a blueprint for similar efforts worldwide.

Contents

Education

Waters studied Biology at University at Albany, SUNY and graduated with a B.Sc. in 1992. In 1998, she earned her Ph.D. in Biology. During her Ph.D., she used quantitative fluorescence live cell imaging to study the mechanisms and regulation of mitosis in vertebrate tissue culture cells. After completing her thesis, supervised by Edward D. Salmon, [4] she moved to Wake Forest University, where she taught light microscopy courses in their graduate program. [5]

[1] Career

In 2001, she began her position as Director of the Nikon Imaging Center [6] and the Director of the Cell Biology Microscopy Facility at Harvard Medical School. In 2024, the NIC@HMS contract terminated and the core was renamed the Director of the Core for Imaging Technology & Education [1] . Waters and her staff advise and train users in a wide range of light microscopy techniques. Furthermore, she teaches light microscopy courses for graduate students at Harvard Medical School.

Over the years, Waters recognized the need for systematic training of technical imaging experts and implemented such training in the form of a new well-structured postdoctoral fellowship [7] [8] [9] that other facilities have started to implement as well improving technical microscopy expertise worldwide. [10]

Waters has also been involved in several microscopy courses outside of Harvard over the years, including the Analytical and Quantitative Light Microscopy course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. [11]

Since 2011, Waters has organized an annual two-week course on Quantitative Imaging [12] at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, New York. Waters and her team created this course with a dense and comprehensive curriculum. It has become one of the top microscopy courses in the world. [13]

In 2019, Waters was named Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Imaging Scientist. [14] As part of this recognition, Waters has intensified her microscopy outreach activities, including the YouTube channel Microcourses [15] and the searchable database Microlist. [16]

Waters is on the editorial board of BioTechniques, [17] has authored multiple educational articles and reviews on quantitative microscopy, [18] [19] [20] [21] and edited the book “Quantitative Imaging in Cell Biology” [22] with Torsten Wittmann (UCSF).

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electron microscope</span> Type of microscope with electrons as a source of illumination

An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. They use electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing them to produce magnified images or electron diffraction patterns. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times smaller than that of visible light, electron microscopes have a much higher resolution of about 0.1 nm, which compares to about 200 nm for light microscopes. Electron microscope may refer to:

A total internal reflection fluorescence microscope (TIRFM) is a type of microscope with which a thin region of a specimen, usually less than 200 nanometers can be observed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fluorescence microscope</span> Optical microscope that uses fluorescence and phosphorescence

A fluorescence microscope is an optical microscope that uses fluorescence instead of, or in addition to, scattering, reflection, and attenuation or absorption, to study the properties of organic or inorganic substances. "Fluorescence microscope" refers to any microscope that uses fluorescence to generate an image, whether it is a simple set up like an epifluorescence microscope or a more complicated design such as a confocal microscope, which uses optical sectioning to get better resolution of the fluorescence image.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Confocal microscopy</span> Optical imaging technique

Confocal microscopy, most frequently confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) or laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM), is an optical imaging technique for increasing optical resolution and contrast of a micrograph by means of using a spatial pinhole to block out-of-focus light in image formation. Capturing multiple two-dimensional images at different depths in a sample enables the reconstruction of three-dimensional structures within an object. This technique is used extensively in the scientific and industrial communities and typical applications are in life sciences, semiconductor inspection and materials science.

Jason Swedlow is an American-born cell biologist and light microscopist who is Professor of Quantitative Cell Biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, Scotland. He is a co-founder of the Open Microscopy Environment and Glencoe Software. In 2021, he joined Wellcome Leap as a Program Director.

John Graham White is an Emeritus Professor of Anatomy and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests are in the biology of the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and laser microscopy.

Alice Yen-Ping Ting is Taiwanese-born American chemist. She is a professor of genetics, of biology, and by courtesy, of chemistry at Stanford University. She is also a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz</span> American biologist

Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz is a Senior Group Leader at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and a founding member of the Neuronal Cell Biology Program at Janelia. Previously, she was the Chief of the Section on Organelle Biology in the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program, in the Division of Intramural Research in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 2016. Lippincott-Schwartz received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, and performed post-doctoral training with Richard Klausner at the NICHD, NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.

<i>Journal of Cell Biology</i> Academic journal

The Journal of Cell Biology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Rockefeller University Press.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interference reflection microscopy</span>

Interference reflection microscopy (IRM), also called Reflection Interference Contrast Microscopy (RICM) or Reflection Contrast Microscopy (RCM) depending on the context, is an optical microscopy technique that leverages interference effects to form an image of an object on a glass surface. The intensity of the signal is a measure of proximity of the object to the glass surface. This technique can be used to study events at the cell membrane without the use of a (fluorescent) label as is the case for TIRF microscopy.

Xiaowei Zhuang is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffraction limits of traditional light microscopes, allowing scientists to visualize small structures within living cells. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019 and was awarded a Vilcek Foundation Prize in Biomedical Science in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert F. Murphy (computational biologist)</span>

Robert F. Murphy is Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology Emeritus and Director of the M.S. Program in Automated Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to his retirement in May 2021, he was the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology as well as Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Machine Learning. He was founding Director of the Center for Bioimage Informatics at Carnegie Mellon and founded the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology. He also founded the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University and served as its head from 2009 to 2020.

CellCognition is a free open-source computational framework for quantitative analysis of high-throughput fluorescence microscopy (time-lapse) images in the field of bioimage informatics and systems microscopy. The CellCognition framework uses image processing, computer vision and machine learning techniques for single-cell tracking and classification of cell morphologies. This enables measurements of temporal progression of cell phases, modeling of cellular dynamics and generation of phenotype map.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Light sheet fluorescence microscopy</span> Fluorescence microscopy technique

Light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) is a fluorescence microscopy technique with an intermediate-to-high optical resolution, but good optical sectioning capabilities and high speed. In contrast to epifluorescence microscopy only a thin slice of the sample is illuminated perpendicularly to the direction of observation. For illumination, a laser light-sheet is used, i.e. a laser beam which is focused only in one direction. A second method uses a circular beam scanned in one direction to create the lightsheet. As only the actually observed section is illuminated, this method reduces the photodamage and stress induced on a living sample. Also the good optical sectioning capability reduces the background signal and thus creates images with higher contrast, comparable to confocal microscopy. Because light sheet fluorescence microscopy scans samples by using a plane of light instead of a point, it can acquire images at speeds 100 to 1,000 times faster than those offered by point-scanning methods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Live-cell imaging</span> Study of living cells using time-lapse microscopy

Live-cell imaging is the study of living cells using time-lapse microscopy. It is used by scientists to obtain a better understanding of biological function through the study of cellular dynamics. Live-cell imaging was pioneered in the first decade of the 21st century. One of the first time-lapse microcinematographic films of cells ever made was made by Julius Ries, showing the fertilization and development of the sea urchin egg. Since then, several microscopy methods have been developed to study living cells in greater detail with less effort. A newer type of imaging using quantum dots have been used, as they are shown to be more stable. The development of holotomographic microscopy has disregarded phototoxicity and other staining-derived disadvantages by implementing digital staining based on cells’ refractive index.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Stow</span> Australian scientist

Jennifer Lea Stow is deputy director (research), NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and head of the Protein Trafficking and Inflammation laboratory at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), The University of Queensland, Australia. She received a PhD from Monash University in Melbourne in 1982., postdoctoral training at Yale University School of Medicine (US) in the Department of Cell Biologyand first faculty position as an assistant professor at Harvard University in the Renal Unit, Departments of Medicine and Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amy Gladfelter</span> American cell biologist (born 1974)

Amy S. Gladfelter is an American quantitative cell biologist who is interested in understanding fundamental mechanisms of cell organization. She was a Professor of Biology and the Associate Chair for Diversity Initiatives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, before moving to Department of Cell Biology at Duke University. She investigates cell cycle control and the septin cytoskeleton. She is also affiliated with the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and is a fellow of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.

Nancy Kedersha is an American cell biologist and micrographer. She got her Ph.D. from Rutgers University where she worked in Richard Berg's lab studying the characteristics and assembly of prolyl hydroxylases. Afterwards she joined Leonard Rome's lab at UCLA as a post-doctoral fellow where she co-discovered the vault (organelle). Subsequently, she worked at ImmunoGen Inc. where she worked on staining and photographing different cancer cells. She then worked as an instructor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Paul Anderson's lab, where her work focused on studying stress granule formation. In late-2020, she retired. In addition to her contributions as a scientist, Kedersha has been quite successful in different microscopy competitions. She is a four-time Nikon Small World finalist and in 2011 she won the Lennart Nilsson Award.

Melike Lakadamyali is a Cypriot physicist and an Associate Professor of Physiology and of Cell and Developmental Biology (secondary) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, renowned for her work in super-resolution microscopy and Single Molecule Biophysics. She is the Group Leader of the Lakadamyali Lab.

Peter John O'Toole is a British biologist who is the Director of the Bioscience Technology Facility and the Head of Imaging and Cytometry at University of York. Since 2023, O'Toole has served as the president of the Royal Microscopical Society.

References

  1. 1 2 3 CITE. "Core for Imaging Technology & Education". Core for Imaging Technology & Education. Retrieved May 14, 2024.
  2. ↑ "Jennifer Waters". November 2020. Archived from the original on July 12, 2023. Retrieved July 12, 2023.
  3. ↑ "The Microscopists interviews Jennifer Waters (Nikon Imaging Center)". Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023– via www.youtube.com.
  4. ↑ "Salmon Lab Home Page". Archived from the original on April 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  5. ↑ "Interviews with Imaging Experts – Jennifer C. Waters, Ph.D. | Yokogawa Europe". Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  6. ↑ "Nikon Imaging Center at Harvard Medical School". Nikon Imaging Center at Harvard Medical School. Archived from the original on July 12, 2023. Retrieved July 12, 2023.
  7. ↑ Waters, Jennifer C. (September 1, 2020). "A Novel Paradigm for Expert Core Facility Staff Training". Trends in Cell Biology. 30 (9): 669–672. doi:10.1016/j.tcb.2020.06.001. PMID   32622700. S2CID   220372011 – via ScienceDirect.
  8. ↑ "Dr. Jennifer Waters develops a novel fellowship program". cellbio.hms.harvard.edu. January 28, 2021. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  9. ↑ "Advanced Microscopy Fellowship". Advanced Microscopy Fellowship. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  10. ↑ Ravindran, Sandeep (December 8, 2020). "Core curriculum: learning to manage a shared microscopy facility". Nature. 588 (7837): 358–360. Bibcode:2020Natur.588..358R. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-03466-z. PMID   33293714. S2CID   228080325. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023– via www.nature.com.
  11. ↑ "Analytical And Quantitative Light Microscopy 2008 | History of the Marine Biological Laboratory". history.archives.mbl.edu. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  12. ↑ "Quantitative Imaging: From Acquisition to Analysis 2023 | CSHL". meetings.cshl.edu. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  13. ↑ "Microscopy Courses". hcbi.fas.harvard.edu. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  14. 1 2 "Advancing & Professionalizing Careers in Imaging Science". Archived from the original on July 12, 2023. Retrieved July 12, 2023.
  15. ↑ "Microcourses – YouTube". www.youtube.com. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  16. ↑ "Microlist – Microscopy courses, software, meetings & jobs". Microlist. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  17. ↑ "Editorial board – BioTechniques". Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  18. ↑ Jost, Anna Payne-Tobin; Waters, Jennifer C. (March 20, 2019). "Designing a rigorous microscopy experiment: Validating methods and avoiding bias". Journal of Cell Biology. 218 (5). Rockefeller University Press: 1452–1466. doi:10.1083/jcb.201812109. ISSN   0021-9525. PMC   6504886 . PMID   30894402.
  19. ↑ Icha, Jaroslav; Weber, Michael; Waters, Jennifer C.; Norden, Caren (August 17, 2017). "Phototoxicity in live fluorescence microscopy, and how to avoid it". BioEssays. 39 (8): 1700003. doi:10.1002/bies.201700003. hdl: 21.11116/0000-0002-8C94-9 . PMID   28749075. S2CID   19974817. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023– via CrossRef.
  20. ↑ Lambert, Talley J.; Waters, Jennifer C. (December 5, 2016). "Navigating challenges in the application of superresolution microscopy". Journal of Cell Biology. 216 (1). Rockefeller University Press: 53–63. doi:10.1083/jcb.201610011. ISSN   0021-9525. PMC   5223610 . PMID   27920217.
  21. ↑ Waters, Jennifer C. (June 29, 2009). "Accuracy and precision in quantitative fluorescence microscopy". Journal of Cell Biology. 185 (7). Rockefeller University Press: 1135–1148. doi:10.1083/jcb.200903097. ISSN   1540-8140. PMC   2712964 . PMID   19564400.
  22. ↑ "Quantitative Imaging in Cell Biology, Volume 123 – 1st Edition". shop.elsevier.com. Archived from the original on July 15, 2023. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  23. ↑ "napari-micromanager Plugin for Custom Microscope Control". Archived from the original on July 12, 2023. Retrieved July 12, 2023.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.