Franklin & Marshall College

LANCASTER, Pa. - Omar Quintero, a biologist at Mount Holyoke College, and former assistant professor of biology at Franklin & Marshall, will discuss "From Ground Glass to Silicon Wafers: Microscopy, Cell Biology, and Imaging in the Digital Age" on Thursday, Sept. 18 at 4:30 p.m. at Franklin & Marshall College. Quintero's talk will take place in the Room 138 of the Barshinger Life Sciences and Philosophy Building. His presentation is sponsored by the Center for Liberal Arts and Society, and the Department of Biology, and is free and open to the public.

The study of cells began with simple microscopes, according the Quintero, and the description of observations through hand-drawn images. To this day, state-of-the art cell biology research depends on the ability to image cells and their components. Technological advancements in the design of optics, regulation of light, and image capture have advanced microscopy from a descriptive tool to an extremely powerful quantitative tool.

"Not only have microscopy and imaging allowed scientists to understand the inner workings of cells," said Quintero, "they are now being used in combination with synthetic organic chemistry to drive drug discovery and in combination with bioinformatics to elucidate the roles of particular genes in cellular functions. In this talk I will introduce the audience to the basics of microscopic imaging and also intend to use the work of former Franklin & Marshall students to illustrate some of the major advancements in microscopy that have made it the workhorse of cell biology research for more than 400 years."

Quintero graduated from the Pennsylvania State University with a B.S. in biochemistry in 1996 and earned his Ph.D. in cell biology at Duke in 2001. From there, he went on to do a post-doctoral fellowship with Richard Cheney at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill until 2005 when he joined the F&M biology department. He became a member of the Mount Holyoke faculty in 2007. His training in microscopy came from a course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., in 1997 and his post-doctoral work at the University of North Carolina. He returned to Woods Hole in 2004 to assist in the microscopy portion of a physiology course, and in 2006, he took two F&M students with him to Woods Hole on a research fellowship.

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