My lab develops optical imaging methods and microscopy methods to look at the
living brain and then we use them to study lots of different aspects of how the brain works
I'm a physical volcanologist which means I study all
the physical processes that control volcanic eruptions and what happens to
the materials that come out of a volcano after they come outside
I first met in at Einat at a data science institute event on data visualization I gave a presentation
and I talked about my new fast 3d scape microscope and how it generated tons and
tons of data and there were all different ways of looking at that data I
presented a lot of results on neuroscience samples.
And I thought this would be brilliant for Volcanology and for looking at the microstructure of bubbles
and crystals and how they all interact so I pushed there and we wrote a grant together and got funded
I've always found volcanoes fascinating and of
course I want to learn what Einat wants to learn but the question that we're
interested in answering is is understanding the way in which materials
flow when there's a mixture of bubbles and solids inside of those liquids and I
trained as a physicist and I'm really appreciative of anything in the world
where we're trying to understand the fundamental principles that kind of
govern the properties of these more complex systems
so to understand how a volcano erupts or how it evolves you need to have an understanding of the
physics and the chemistry that controls it and some of these processes are super
big and some of the fossils happen at the very small scale and and all this
knowledge is going into computer simulations for example where we say
under these conditions will this volcano erupt but we need to know what types of
physics to put in their models and this can only be done by doing experiments
and getting the observations to put into these models
In my lab we use lasers and optics to try to gather information about living tissue and the thing about
living tissue is that it's alive and it's moving and
it's got a lot of dynamics to it and so we tried to build imaging systems and
microscopes that could go really really fast and then because we were imaging
the brain we needed to image deep into the brain so we needed to do 3d imaging
the idea for escape came about over like a 10-year period we we were doing lots
of different methods and we came up with this kind of really weird way of
collecting images that in the beginning we didn't even know if it was gonna work
but as things developed gradually you know we realized it was a microscope and
we started some collaborations with people who had small things that they
wanted to image in 3d like fruit flies and crawling and fruit fly larvae and
then you know it grew from there and more that we realized it could do we
expanded its capabilities we expanded the things that we wanted to image using.
The experiments are run by a postdoc from Volcanology and a graduate student from
engineering and they put together the instruments one is making the mixture
the other setting of the microscope and then the image it. Before we started with
the small experiments, we also had students in the lab working together to
test different materials test different processes that they can then miniaturize and put in the microscope
This project is certainly rekindled my childhood love
of volcanoes and geography I took my kids to the lamont-doherty open house
earlier last year and we worked with i net to look at you know how lava flows
down the hillside and it reminded me of my honeymoon in Hawaii and recently I
took my kids to Yellowstone and had great fun explaining to them all the
different processes that lead to all the different volcanic rock formations and
so on so I've got really excited about it again and it's really fun to feel
like our microscope is actually contributing to our fundamental
understanding of that