General News
A Powerful Light on Biology May Go Dark
- February 28, 2025
My path to science began with fundamental curiosity about how things work, starting with observations of nature and evolving into a deep fascination with life sciences and cell biology.
This curiosity led me to pursue a Ph.D. in France, where I first encountered the transformative power of microscopy. My subsequent postdoctoral work in Germany exposed me to high-end microscopes and world-class facilities, inspiring my transition from research to scientific service.
The opportunity to establish a new microscopy facility at MDIBL drew me to the United States—a country I was attracted to for its history of research excellence, innovation, and the freedom to pursue new ideas. With complete autonomy from leadership, I built our microscopy facility from the ground up, implementing what has become one of the most comprehensive microscopy training programs in the United States.
In just five years, we transformed from an unknown facility into one of the top five fastest-growing and community-impacting microscopy centers in the country. Our commitment to excellence is reflected in our rigorous quality control processes, including regular maintenance, system calibration, and continuous performance monitoring.
The unique capabilities we’ve developed span an extraordinary range of scales and resolutions. Using our custom light sheet microscopy, we can analyze subjects in unprecedented detail, while our Zeiss 980 with Airyscan technology allows us to break the diffraction limit for sub-resolution imaging.
We’re proud to be the first in the Northeast region to offer access to novel high-resolution microscopy and custom-made light sheet microscopes, enabling unprecedented 3D visualization of entire organs—from mouse brains to adult zebrafish—at resolutions commercial microscopes cannot match.
We are the only facility in Maine offering such a complete spectrum of imaging capabilities, and through our INBRE network of 17 research and higher education institutions—largely funded by the National Institutes of Health—we’ve made these cutting-edge technologies available to multiple institutions across the state.
We’ve pioneered further accessibility to these powerful technologies by creating a unique 10-day, free course for Maine researchers, eliminating financial barriers that typically restrict access to such technology. This democratization of advanced microscopy access has enabled numerous researchers to pursue questions that would be impossible to address elsewhere, enabling groundbreaking discoveries and publications in high-impact journals.
But our facility’s impact extends beyond Maine’s borders, earning recognition across North America. We were featured at LABIxBINA 2023 for our precision microscopy work, and we’ve achieved the highest user participation in BioImaging North America Image Contests from 2021 to 2024.
MDI Bio Lab’s Light Microscopy Facility now hosts two of the largest microscopy courses on the continent, serving as a crucial educational hub for researchers. The loss of these training programs would create a significant gap in advanced microscopy education throughout North America, impacting the next generation of scientists far beyond our state’s boundaries.
And our facility’s footprint is becoming global, as evidenced by our web analytics, which show 23,520 total page views from 5,282 unique visitors, with an impressive engagement rate of 4.45 pages per visit. Our reach extends across multiple continents, with significant traffic from the United States (3,718 views), Singapore (403 views), China (91 views), Russian Federation (81 views), Republic of Korea (73 views), Germany (72 views), United Kingdom (65 views), France (58 views), and Taiwan (57 views).
This international interest demonstrates how our facility has become a world-recognized microscopy resource.
But microscopy isn’t just about having access to sophisticated equipment – it requires years of specialized training and expertise to properly utilize these tools for meaningful discovery. Just as holding a brush doesn’t make someone a painter, operating a microscope requires deep understanding and experience to generate reliable scientific insights. Losing this capability would effectively send Maine back to the dark ages of scientific research.
The knowledge we’ve accumulated and the community we’ve built are irreplaceable. Our facility has become a crucial hub for biomedical research, enabling talented postdoctoral researchers to make groundbreaking discoveries that have launched their independent careers.
We’ve created a collaborative scientific network that didn’t exist before, bringing together researchers across Maine and providing them with tools and expertise essential for modern biological research.
This work has implications for numerous fields, from developmental biology to disease research, and its interruption would delay countless potential medical breakthroughs.
Science progresses through the accumulation of knowledge and expertise, built carefully over years of dedicated work.
And the potential pullback of MDI Bio Lab’s operations would have devastating consequences not just for science, but in individual lives, including my own.
As one of only two experts in Maine capable of operating our advanced instruments, my departure would create a significant knowledge gap. My visa would be canceled, forcing me to leave the country and potentially lose both my house and future with my fiancée—whom I actually met through microscopy training at our facility. Our shared passion for scientific detail, cutting-edge technology, and the beauty of nature brought us together, making this facility not just the foundation of my career but also my personal happiness.
If they come to pass, these cuts in federal research funding would unravel a carefully constructed ecosystem of scientific innovation that has positioned Maine at the forefront of microscopy research and training. This is a setback our scientific community, and the progress we enable, might not recover from for generations.