I guess we will start today with me talking about myself, something I simultaneously love and loathe doing.

THREAD

I was born and raised in Ghana, West Africa. Like all Ghanaians I am incredibly proud of my country, but kinda low-key about it. I will say that we make the best Jollof though

Like most African families, mine pushed education hard. My parents both came of age just as Ghana gained independence from Britain, and were consequently part of the first generation for whom a university education was even possible.....

...and so nothing less was ever going to be good enough for their kids. I was never a particularly disciplined student, but I worked hard at things I liked and I am pathologically curious, so I did well almost despite myself

After primary and secondary school in Ghana I got a scholarship to Oberlin College in Ohio to study electrical engineering. Oberlin didn't have an engineering department so the idea was you did three years there and then transferred to another university for the last two

I started taking physics classes in my first year, changed my major, and never left, so instead I ended up with a BA in Physics. I do not regret this decision at all

Post-undergrad the plan had been to start grad school straight away, but I was kinda burned out for various reasons, so I lived in Cleveland for a year taking Masters level classes and working as a lab assistant, then I moved to New Jersey to start up a PhD that I hated....

Around about the same time my mother got sick, so the combination of burnout, being unhappy with where I was and being worried about her led to me taking a temporary leave of absence that turned permanent, and I moved back home to Ghana

In Ghana, I got a job working in a government IT research/training institute where I looked after a compute cluster, taught basic programming classes, consulted with national universes and generally ran around doing a bit of everything. It was hard and wonderful, but not enough

So.. a little over a year later I ended up in London to do an MRes in physics, specialising in photonics. The actual research was building computer simulations to understand the plasmonic responses of silver nanoparticles that were being used in imaging

(don't worry, I will explain what that is tomorrow, complete with pictures)

After the masters, One of my supervisors had that holiest of grails, research funding that could go to a non-British, Non-EU student, and he had an imaging project he thought I'd be good for

The project was a mixture of microscope building, imaging and image analysis, and I hadn't done any real experimental work in years outside of supervising undergraduate labs. But I was good with my hands and the project sounded fun, plus he had funding so.....

For the next three years, I primarily worked at National Physical Laboratory in Teddington and learning a ton about microscope building and single molecule imaging to build a microscope and work on a technique for measuring the orientation of single fluorescent molecules

Post PhD, I then ended up at Imperial College working in a photonics lab and working on ways to perform super-resolution microscopy on the cheap, so it was another learning curve on picking up a new technique, but tremendous fun

After 3 years at Imperial and leaving behind a working microscope, I moved to UCL to split time between an AFM lab, and EM lab and a fluorescence microscopy lab. This time less instrument development and more time on a specific problem, with a few side projects

This still remains my favorite side project, helping build a light sheet microscope out of mostly leftover gear in the lab https://twitter.com/Olu_GH/status/1176206835038265347

And now on to the current gig, which finally took me out of London to Cambridge

I am now am imaging scientist at @emblebi and working with some very smart people to build hardware and software platforms for high throughput spatial transcriptomics

less buzzwordy version, we use microscopes to image active genes inside cells, except we want to be able to image hundreds of genes in hundreds of thousands of cells, and do it as fast as possible