Electron Microscopy Facility Manager

The Department and role purpose:

The Department of Biosciences seeks a talented and dedicated electron microscopist to manage the Electron Microscopy (EM) Facility and to carry out and/or oversee all EM work in the facility. The role is to work with research groups, collaborators and external users, to provide and help to provide, high quality EM data for publication, grant applications and commercial collaborators, as well as training and teaching EM methods and theory to users and students at all levels. This is an exciting and challenging opportunity. It will involve a wide range of research projects using a variety of organisms and specimens. It will also involve maintaining and developing the facility.

Currently, work in the department involving EM includes biomedicine, biofuels, plant sciences, bioengineering, viruses, protozoan parasites and numerous model organisms such as Drosophila, C. elegans, yeasts and Arabidopsis. For instance, EM is used to assess skin and other complex 3D model systems, cytoskeletal organisation in plants, mammals and invertebrates, extracellular matrix secretion and organisation, nuclear pore complex and nuclear envelope structure, organisation and roles in cellular functions and biomechanical properties, as well as analysis of isolated proteins and complexes.

Imaging is a strategic focus of the department, and the EM facility works closely with the Light Microscopy facility, which has the latest super-resolution, functional imaging, confocal and live microscopies. We would like to continue to directly develop this link with correlative light and electron microscopy methods.

This is a modern facility with state-of-the-art specimen preparation and imaging instrumentation including: Leica EM ICE high pressure freezer (HPF) with light stimulation; Leica robotic freeze substitution (FS) units with agitation modules; Leica EM TRIM; Leica UC7 and UC6 ultramicrotomes with cryo-stages and array tomography; Carbon coating/metal evaporation unit; High resolution chromium/platinum/other metal sputter coater with cryo-stage; Hitachi H7600 TEM with EMSIS Xarosa 20MP camera; Hitachi S-5200 field emission, in-lens high resolution SEMwith cryo-stage.