Medical Engineering Seminar

Abstract

The development of microscopic techniques over the past two decades has revolutionized cell biology, but there are still crucial biological processes whose details elude us: for example, feeding behavior of microorganisms in the ocean, or migration of cancer cells to form micro-metastases. This talk will focus on two approaches designed to image cell motility and migration. The first is the development of a two-beam holographic microscope with ultra-resolution, with intended applications in environmental microbiology. Holography is a well-established imaging technique that uses the interference of light to record and reproduce three-dimensional images of objects. The second part of the talk will demonstrate the photophysical principles of semiconductor and metal nanoparticles that make them environmentally responsive in a cellular context, with a particular focus on cancer biology. The use of unconjugated and conjugated nanoparticles as subcellular labels in cells is shown, using both fluorescence intensity and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) as indicators.

Bio

Jay L. Nadeau spent 10 years as an Assistant/Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Physics at McGill University (2004-2015). Research interests include nanoparticles, fluorescence imaging, and development of instrumentation for detection of life elsewhere in the Solar System. She has created two graduate level courses—Methods in Molecular Biology for Physical Scientists and Mathematical Cellular Physiology—and written a textbook, Introduction to Molecular Biophysics (Taylor&Francis 2011; Second Edition 2017). Before McGill, she was a member of JPL's Center for Life Detection, and previous to that a Burroughs-Wellcome postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Henry A. Lester at Caltech. She received her PhD in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1996.