An award is made to the Bioengineering Program, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (UM-D) to acquire an Olympus FV1200 spectral laser scanning confocal microscope (LSCM). UM-D has recently introduced an undergraduate Bioengineering program. Bioengineering research at UM-D involves faculty and students from engineering and natural sciences. The new confocal capabilities will facilitate development of research and education in the newly launched program. The undergraduate classes at UM-D are small in size, enabling the faculty members to teach advanced experimental approaches to the students while providing face-to-face demonstrations of the confocal technique. Thus, the new instrument will help in the developing undergraduate curriculum of the Bioengineering program. In addition, it will provide an opportunity to develop new science activities/workshops to introduce aspects of bioengineering to high school students and teachers, aligned with national and Michigan science education standards. High school students from the Detroit metropolitan area will continue to obtain opportunities to participate in summer research. These students will have access to the instrument through their involvement in various research projects supervised by the faculty users.
This Olympus FV1200 laser confocal microscope will substantially improve the quality of Bioengineering research at UM-D by overcoming the limits of conventional microscopic analysis. It will help to achieve high spectral resolution, rapid data acquisition, live cell and tissue imaging through time series analysis, 3D reconstruction, and fluorescence recovery. Bioengineering research at UM-D is multidisciplinary in nature spanning diverse research interests from developing scaffolds for tissue regeneration to studying ocular biomechanics and cancer metastasis, from exploring dynamics of microbial communities to modulation of hypoxia in islets and cryopreservation of living cells. In addition, the new confocal capabilities will set the stage for establishing inter-institution collaboration and also help to attract new research projects to the campus. In addition, four of the PI, Co-PIs, and users of the instrument are pre-tenure, junior faculty. The state-of-the art-microscope will provide them the cutting edge tool necessary to successfully establish their research programs.
