As a microscopist, my job is to bridge the gap between advanced technologies and advanced biology. I need to be able to understand the technology as well as the basic biological concepts to know what the researcher wants from an experiment and how to decode the results.

We want to take the best technologies in the world and put them in the hands of the scientists asking the most important questions about medical research.

You can gain a lot more insight from a three-dimensional image than you can from a two-dimensional image, which is what we can achieve with cutting-edge microscopy techniques, such as the lattice light sheet microscope.

Kylie was an Honours student when we met in 2017, and we have worked together sporadically throughout the years.

My research aims to better understand the behaviour of white blood cells, known as T cells, to engineer and improve immunotherapy, which is what you might call the fourth pillar of cancer therapy (along with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy), which harnesses the body’s immune system to fight cancer.

I’m particularly interested in how T cells attach to cancer cells and form what is known as an ‘immune synapse’, which facilitates communication between the T cell and the cancer or target cell.

What is fantastic about the cutting-edge microscopes we have available at WEHI’s Centre for Dynamic Imaging is that we can view, in great detail, live T cells and see how they behave when surrounded by cancer or virus-infected cells across different points in time.

As researchers, we rely quite heavily on microscopists to bridge imaging technologies with our research and their expertise to get the best results for our experiments. I first met Niall when I started my Honours year at WEHI and have since worked together on several occasions, most recently using the lattice light sheet microscope to image T cells and cancer cells.

Niall is enthusiastic and generous with his microscopy knowledge. He is always willing to explain the technological aspects of imaging and help me find ways to incorporate imaging technologies into my research.

WEHI’s researchers are seeking members of the public who would like to contribute to better outcomes in the medical research sector through our Consumer Buddy program.

Consumer representatives do not need to have a science or medical background. Our researchers are interested in non-scientific perspectives to assist in communicating scientific information and relating laboratory research to community experiences.

Pairing consumers with researchers allows our scientists to make discoveries that improve human health. We are particularly interested in talking to members of the public who are current or past patients, family members, carers or friends of patients, with a desire to help improve research outcomes.

The disease areas we are most interested in finding consumer representatives for are: brain cancer, blood cancers (lymphoma, leukemia including AML, MML and CLL), lung cancer, bowel cancer, oesophageal cancer, melanoma, rare cancers, immunotherapy and cancer with an interest in CAR-T research, asthma and inflammatory bowel disease.

To learn more, contact Katya Gray on 03 9345 2981 or email consumers@wehi.edu.au.