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Personnel

Diane DurhamDianne Durham, Ph.D., Professor of Otolaryngology serves as the Scientific Director of the Core. From past and current funding projects Dr. Durham brings a wealth of experience in the area of tissue preparation and visualization by various microscopy including light/contrast, confocal/fluorescence, scanning and immuno transmission electron microscopy. Dr. Durham is likewise proficient in many approaches to image analysis, cell mapping, and 3d reconstruction. Please reach out to Dr. Durham to discuss imaging collaborations with the core at ddurham@kumc.edu


Sarah Tague

Sarah Tague, Ph.D. is a Senior Scientist in the core who’s education includes B.A.’s in Microbiology, Germanic Languages & Literatures, and Fine Art (University of Kansas, Lawrence), a M.S. in Biology (University of Notre Dame, South Bend), and a Ph.D in Physiology (University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City). She has over 25 years of laboratory experience and has been using confocal and light microscopes for more than 20 years.  Sarah joined the core in 2012 and facilitates training and experimental design relevant to imaging end points. In addition to her microscopy experience, she has ~20 years of experience developing animal and cell culture models of disease with defined outcomes. She can help with overall experimental design as well as tissue processing and analysis. For support within the Integrative Imaging microscopy suites, please e email stague@kumc.edu.


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Christine Smoyer, Ph.D. joined the core as a Research Associate in 2021 bringing 15 years of experience in microscopy. She enjoys applying new techniques and tools in microscopy towards experimental questions. She has experience with protein localization, dynamics, and targeting in live yeast cells. She adapted the split-GFP bimolecular complementation system to survey all predicted membrane proteins in S. cerevisiae for localization to the inner nuclear membrane (INM), and further demonstrated that split-GFP could be combined with fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy to study the components of protein complexes at different cellular locations and verified localization of a subset of these by immuno-EM. She also has imaging experience in mammalian cell culture, Drosophila adult brains and larval neuromuscular junctions, as well as in vitro protein-microtubule associations using total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy. She is experienced with Zeiss, Leica, Nikon, and Perkin-Elmer microscopes and in analyzing images in Fiji/Image J and Imaris software. She is experienced in microscopy training, having previously served as a microcopy teaching assistant at the Cold Spring Harbor Yeast Genetics course as well as in multiple microscopy modules at the Graduate School of the Stowers Institute. Please consider reaching out to her with your imaging needs at csmoyer@kumc.edu