Prior to joining ZEISS, Dakota was often performing structural biology experiments with developing mouse tissue during his dissertation years at West Virginia University. During his graduate and postdoctoral career, he utilized a variety of imaging techniques including EM as well as light micrsocopic applications with confocal, two-photon and lattice light sheet systems.

Dr. Duffy spent the beginning of her career training as a tissue engineer and applying advanced 3D imaging techniques to quantify engineered organs-on-a-chip before becoming an applications specialist for ZEISS. She attended Virginia Commonwealth University to earn her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering, and she pursued her graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in in Adam Feinberg’s lab where her research focused on engineering contractile skeletal and cardiac muscle microtissues. She continued her in vitro tissue engineering work through a collaborative post-doc in Boehringer Ingelheim’s SHINE program where she worked in Linda Griffith’s lab at MIT. For this project she focused on building 3D intestinal fibrosis models to measure Collagen Type I assembly from patient-derived cells in 3D microenvironments using laser scanning confocal and multi-photon imaging. From there she moved on to work as a scientist at United Therapeutics, working to build technology to 3D print human lungs for transplant patients. During this time, she established key cellular attachment, proliferation, and migration assays used to assess in-house developed bioinks, and she used a suite of ZEISS microscopes to assess cellularization of 3D printed scaffolds (CD7, LSM880, LSM980, Lightsheet 7).

Amita has been with ZEISS for 5+ years and is responsible for Widefield and Automated Imaging platforms (Axioscan 7 and Celldiscoverer 7) at the ZEISS Microscopy Customer Center, Bay Area. With over 15 years of microscopy experience working on projects imaging microbial biofilms, medical implants, and intracellular transport vesicles, there is never a dull day with recent samples spanning chocolate fudge, cheese wrappers and rock sections! Before ZEISS, Amita was an HHMI Research Specialist under the guidance of Dr. Randy Schekman (Nobel Laureate) at UC Berkeley and utilized CLEM techniques to elucidate collagen containing transport carriers. Amita has authored several publications throughout her career, and several were first-time observations using electron microscopy techniques in the late Dr. Bill Costerton's lab (a pioneer in Biofilms). Amita has a Masters in Integrated Biology and holds a PhD in Comparative Biochemistry from University of California, Berkeley.
  

Eric has been a lifelong enthusiast of everything in the technical, mechanical and computing worlds. He holds a biology degree and has been actively engaged in the microscopy business for 14 years. Eric’s biggest enjoyments come with his wife and two daughters, teaching them how to fix things when broken and creatively help the world around them.