Anna Payne-Tobin Jost completed her PhD work in Orion Weiner’s lab at USCF before joining the Advance Microscopy Fellowship program in 2015.
Anna’s thoughts on her experience with the fellowship program:
“Being part of a big microscopy core like the NIC has given me the opportunity to learn about all aspects of core facility life, from user training and consultation, to microscope maintenance, to grant writing and management. On the technical side, I’ve learned the theory and practice of a wide variety of advanced microscopy techniques, including FRAP, ratiometric imaging, single-molecule imaging, SIM, and STORM. I’ve tested, reinforced, and deepened my understanding by training users in each of these techniques.
I love teaching, so I spend a lot of my time working on our microscopy workshop program at HMS. I lecture in our workshops, develop new lectures and lab exercises, and coordinate workshop logistics. I recently organized a new point scanning confocal microscopy workshop with new lecture and lab content, and this summer I’m planning to develop a live cell imaging workshop. When I want to learn more about a topic, I develop a lecture about it; there’s always an enthusiastic and appreciative audience for microscopy lectures at HMS. I’m also very much involved in our annual Cold Spring Harbor course, and in the months leading up to the course, I help to write lab exercises, prepare samples, and coordinate equipment.
I’ve also worked on several other projects, including an ongoing project to automate our quarterly microscope inspections and developing methods to measure phototoxicity.”