Research mentorship
The thesis is where most students first meet the gap between 'I have data' and 'I have an argument.' I work through that gap — thesis structure, analysis reasoning, and what it means to decide something from an image.
Teaching
Teaching students how to think, not just how to take measures.
Alongside my research, I mentor thesis students, teach at university level, and run microscopy and image-analysis training in the lab. My aim is to teach students how to think through a problem, design experiments that can actually answer it, validate their own results, and use the tools with intent — not just follow a protocol step by step.
Teaching interests
Where I focus
Whether it's a student writing their first thesis, a course group meeting confocal microscopy for the first time, or a colleague learning an analysis workflow — these are the three things I keep coming back to.
Microscopy foundations
Most students arrive with a protocol. I try to step back before that — to the question the image is meant to answer, and how acquisition settings either support or undermine it.
Scientific thinking
Connecting an observation to a testable claim, choosing controls that can actually falsify it, and reading figures critically. Most of this isn't taught explicitly — which is why it's worth teaching.
Teaching philosophy
Tools matter, but understanding matters more
Start from first principles, not the tools
Every number you measure stands in for a biological claim. A WFA intensity threshold isn't a slider in FIJI — it's you deciding what counts as a denser perineuronal net. So we begin there: state the hypothesis out loud, define what a real effect would actually look like, and only then choose the measurement that could reveal it. The tool comes last, because the question asked for it — never the other way around.
Every step is a decision you must defend
A pipeline is a chain of judgments about the biology — background subtraction, ROI size, the channel that defines colocalization. If you can't say why you made a choice, you haven't made one; you've inherited an assumption. I push students until they can justify each step on its own, because the steps they can't defend are exactly the ones quietly deciding the result.
Work together
Stuck on a thesis, a figure, or a measurement?
I'm always glad to hear from students and early-career researchers — whether it's mentorship, a microscopy question, or an analysis you can't quite defend yet.