Julie Thomas
A deceptively chaotic proteolysis step is central to jumbo phage head formation
Julie is an Associate professor in the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences at RIT. From her graduate studies at La Trobe University to now, Julie’s research has focused on tailed phages. Julie became hooked on the somewhat weird biology of jumbo phages during her postdoctoral studies at the University of Texas Health Science Center and the University of Maryland Baltimore and they have been the focus of her research ever since. Jumbo phages are phages with unusually long genomes (>200 kb) that contain many, sometimes hundreds, of functionally uncharacterized genes. Jumbo phage virions are large and complex relative to many phage types and the capsids of some, like that of Salmonella phage SPN3US, contain hundreds of proteins that with the DNA are ejected into the host cell. Julie’s research utilizes multiple approaches to study jumbo phages, including TEM, mass spectrometry and genetics. In this talk, Julie will discuss her lab’s research on SPN3US and their ongoing quest to understand the cues that govern head assembly, especially proteolytic maturation. Proteolytic maturation is an essential, yet poorly understood mechanism that transforms spherical precursor head particles into expanded structures with icosahedral symmetry able to undergo DNA packaging.
Duncan Sousa
Beckman Center for CryoEM at Johns Hopkins
FIB/SEM and Cryo-ET Overview
Bio
Sara Pawlak
&
Lee Cohen-Gould
Introduction of MSA CEMT Certification Program
Sara was first introduced to Professor Rob Smith and electron microscopy through a work study position during her freshman year at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Through his encouragement and her curiosity, Sara spent the next several years incorporating EM into her degree and volunteering for EM projects in the summers when she would return home to NYC. Shortly after graduating, Sara got her first job working in a diagnostic TEM laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine. With over 10 years of full time experience and a masters in Biomedical Laboratory Management, Sara has remained passionate and at peace doing all things microscopy. After managing the diagnostic EM and IF laboratory at Yale School of Medicine, she joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2024. Here, Sara has had the opportunity to widen her interests to an even greater variety of research and microscopes. She has served as secretary and webmaster for the Society for Ultrastructural Pathology the last several years and is the current chair for the Microscopy Society of America's Certified Electron Microscopy Board.
Lee Cohen-Gould is the Senior Director of the Microscopy & Image Analysis Core Facility at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. Originally hired in 1988 to run what was then the Electron Microscopy Core, the facility has expanded to include optical microscopy instruments including wide field for histology and fluorescence to confocal, 2P, light sheet, whole slide scanning, high throughput and long-term incubation/time lapse imaging. Lee has worked with a wide variety of samples ranging from tissues, to cell cultures & organoids to isolated proteins and extracellular vesicles. Bone samples are among the more challenging tissues submitted to the Core for both histology and electron microscopy.
Tom Strader
Optimization Strategies for Maximum Performance, Efficiency and Sustainability of EM Specimen Prep
Thomas E. Strader, MS-Biotech, has over 20 years of experience engineering laboratory automation systems and more than a decade focused on automating specimen preparation for electron microscopy. He is Administrative Director of BioEMTalks and served as treasurer of the Diagnostic and Biomedical Focused Interest Group (DBM-FIG) from 2002 to 2004. He is also an active member of the Microscopy and Microanalysis Society (MMS), the Midwest Microscopy and Microanalysis Society (M3S), Minnesota Microscopy Society (MinnMass), and the Great Lakes Microscopy Society (GLMS). His career spans R&D and leadership roles at LabOne, Gilson, Promega, Roche NimbleGen, and Microscopy Innovations, where he led product development of innovative automation platforms. As President of Heartland Biotech and inventor of the Prepmaster™ Automated Workflow System, he leads efforts to commercialize cutting-edge solutions that advance EM sample preparation and life science research. He is co-founder and current president of the Midwest Laboratory Robotics Interest Group (Midwest LRIG). He holds an M.S. in Biotechnology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.