The Imaging Core is designed to enhance and broaden Core members' abilities to use state-of-the-art imaging facilities at the University of Maryland. This newly renovated facility, the Laboratory for Biological Ultrastructure (LBU) is well-equipped to carry out transmission electron, scanning electron, and confocal microscopy. Also available within the LBU is an extensive array of preparative equipment. However, there is limited assistance available to users of the facilities of the laboratory, and no training or consultation is routinely provided. Central to the Core's strategy is hiring a technical support person whose primary responsibility will be to enhance the research efforts in the Core faculty's labs by introducing new imaging techniques (e.g., deconvolution microscopy, electron cryomicroscopy, and low temperature field emission scanning microscopy) and innovative uses of established techniques (e.g., SEM, TEM, CON-FOCAL, correlative microscopy, and vascular corrosion casting techniques). The support person will be supervised by the Core Director (Popper) and will also report to the Director of the Laboratory for Biological Ultrastructure (LBU), an individual with more than twenty-five years experience in directing a light and electron microscopic service facility. This Core will provide advanced capabilities to the labs already using imaging as a main component of their research and will encourage and assist other less frequent users in becoming more effective users of imaging technology. This will ultimately lead to new collaborative research efforts that would not otherwise be possible, or even imagined (e.g., comparing hair cell ontogeny in fish and birds). Because of the unique constellations of users involved, a particularly innovative use of this Core is the porting of invertebrate techniques to vertebrates and vice versa.
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