2012 Photomicrography Competition

Daniel Evanko is the chief editor of Nature Methods, a scientific research journal devoted to publishing and reporting on important advances in basic research techniques in the life sciences. He joined Nature Methods as a manuscript editor in 2004 and handled most of the microscopy-related research articles that appeared in the journal, and reported on microscopy developments published elsewhere before becoming chief editor in 2008. He also managed and edited special publishing projects devoted to microscopy techniques and tools. Prior to becoming an editor he made extensive use of fl uorescence microscopy for basic research in the life sciences.

Robert D. Goldman is the Stephen Walter Ranson Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. In his 30 years as department chair, Dr. Gold man has overseen the development of a department that consistently ranks in the top of its peer departments among the 126 U.S. medical schools. Additionally, Goldman is a highly regarded authority on the structure and function of the cytoskeleton, and has published over 240 scientific articles. His laboratory has done much of the basic research on both nuclear and cytoplasmic forms of intermediate filament proteins. Dr. Goldman’s work has earned him a number of honors and awards, including the prestigious Ellison Foundation Senior Scholar Award and a MERIT award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. He is presently the Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Whitman Research Center, located in Woods Hole, Mass.

Martha Harbison is a senior editor at Popular Science magazine, where she edits feature stories and coordinates illustrations and infographics. Before her tenure at PopSci, she was a physical chemist, doing research in academic and industrial laboratories in the U.S. and Germany. Her primary research interests were molecular self-assembly and supramolecular architectures.

Liza Pon is the Laboratory Head at The Pon Lab at Columbia University Medical Center, Department of Cell Biology, and a Professor in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University. In her laboratory, Dr. Pon leads a team of researchers who are working towards a better understanding of cytoskeletal dynamics and function in budding yeast. The group is focused on two specific projects; the role of the actin cytoskeleton in the control of mitochondrial motility and inheritance during cell division, and actin assembly and dynamics during establishment of cell polarity. Additionally, she currently sits on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Cell Biology, as well as the Editorial Board of Frontiers of Mitochondrial Research. She has co-authored two books on her subjects of expertise, Mitochondria (Methods in Cell Biology, Volume 65, 2001), as well as Mitochondria, 2nd Edition (Methods in Cell Biology, Volume 80, 2007).

Michael Davidson is the director of the Optical and Magneto-Optical Imaging Center at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University. Involved with various aspects of microscopy for over 25 years, Davidson’s scientific interests include the packaging of DNA into virus heads, liquid crystallinity in biological systems and the adsorption of small liquid crystal molecules onto surfaces. Davidson has authored many scientific articles on the subject of photomicrography and his photomicrographs have been published in more than a thousand national and international scientific journals, popular magazines and newspapers. In addition, Davidson’s photomicrography has won more than 40 awards in scientific and industrial photography competitions and has been exhibited at over 50 locations nationwide. He is also the expert behind the Nikon Instruments educational Web site MicroscopyU (which can be accessed through the Nikon Instruments Web site at www.nikoninstruments.com) and his own www.molecularexpressions.com.