General Information
The mission of the Science Hill Imaging Facility is to support and accelerate on-going research and to provide suitable space for incremental additions of high-value shared instrumentation. The facility provides access and training to a broad collection of shared microscopes and lab support areas for sample preparation. The Facility is located in Kline Biology Tower.
Dr. Joseph Wolenski manages day-to-day operations in the Facility. Joe is responsible for training new users, helping with experimental design, and coordinating instrument reservations. All users are required to demonstrate basic knowledge of instrument operation prior to unsupervised use of the instrument. Instrument usage is scheduled and monitored via a reservation website, time on the instruments is charged, which varies by the type of instrument and experiment.
History
The Science Hill Imaging facility was launched in 1994 with the intention of providing access to shared microscopy resources to support the Yale’s research. Funding for the first Departmental light microscope was spearheaded by Mark Mooseker and Joe Wolenski, through the Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew funding was previously used to establish and support the advanced undergraduate teaching laboratories in MCDB. Robert Wyman was the PI on the Pew grant used to purchase a Niko Diaphot 200 widefield microscope used for research and in the teaching labs for undergraduates (MCDB 342-345).
In September of 1996 Paul Forscher together with Mark Mooseker, Joel Rosenbaum and Joe Wolenski received NSF funding to purchase two Bio-Rad MRC-1024 confocal microscopes. These confocal scanners were mated to two existing Zeiss Axiovert inverted microscopes and are now housed on the 6th floor of KBT.
In September of 2007 a NIH equipment grant headed by Dinesh Kumar, the Office of the Provost and the Departments of MCDB and EE&B allowed the purchase of two of the current Zeiss LSM 510 confocal microscopes. Additional departmental upgrades to the LSM 510 META include a heated incubation/C02 chamber that were purchased in January of 2008.
In late 2014 in an effort spearheaded by Scott Holley, the University upgraded the current microscopy needs of the facility with the purchase of new confocal microscopes and a Lightsheet instrument.
