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I work as the facility manager at the Scottish Centre for Macromolecular Imaging (SCMI). The microscopes the SCMI uses are a special type of microscope called an electron microscope, which means that they use a beam of electrons to look at the objects the researchers are interested in, instead of a beam of light, like in a microscope you might have at school. Using electrons means we can see much smaller things, like individual virus particles or proteins and enzymes.

Despite being used to look at such tiny objects, the microscope itself is HUGE. Here is a photo of me stood next to our most powerful microscope!

Sat at the controls of the microscope, in the room next door.

To look at such small things, the microscope is very powerful but also very sensitive to the slightest movement or disturbance, so when we use the microscope, we actually sit in the next room to control it. Otherwise even talking and moving around the room could harm our experiment.

Our microscope was funded by 4 Universities, the Government, a cancer research institute and other charities, and we have a plaque thanking them all in our corridor.

The size and difficulty in using the microscope means that specialist staff such as myself and my colleague are needed to help other scientists use the microscope and do their experiments. The microscopes are so large and expensive that not every university can afford to buy one, so we work as a team with researchers across Scotland to all share this microscope here in Glasgow. This photo shows the different Universities and funders who helped us to buy the microscope.

My day is a mixture of setting up the microscope so the other scientists can get the pictures they need and doing work at my desk to manage the facility; making budgets, ordering supplies, scheduling more visits from scientists and other jobs that make our facility nicely organised.

Our microscope is fully automated, so once it is set up, it can run for 2 or 3 days taking images of the scientist’s samples. This means my days are split between setup days and other days.

Preparing samples for loading into the microscope

A setup day means welcoming our user/visitor to the centre and preparing their samples to be put in the microscope and preparing the microscope itself. This takes about half the morning. From there, I work with the visiting scientist to work out where we want the microscope to take pictures, and then we make a queue of thousands of places where we want photos. Then we can set the microscope running and hopefully 2 days later they will have a lovely set of photos to process. The set-up finishes around mid-afternoon and then the visitor can even start to look at the first photos and try to see if they can already learn something from these early images.

On the other days, and squeezed around the microscope setup is when I do the other work needed to manage the facility. This means some paperwork on finance, buying supplies, scheduling visitors for later and responding to questions via email. I also need to read some scientific papers and write papers and presentations, so that I’m keeping up with the newest information and techniques in electron microscopy, and so that I can tell other scientists about how our microscope is working.

I’d like to make a game out of some of the tricky and fiddly jobs that we have to do to help our scientists get their specimens ready for the microscope. I think it’d make a good challenge as to how many small “precious specimens” could be picked up and ‘loaded’ in a minute. It could be something like this large scale demonstration set that was 3D printed by the Victor Change Institute: https://twitter.com/CarusL/status/1106443058189484033.

A small, portable game could be used when groups visit us or taken out to groups along with other engagement activities.

We could also 3D print some of our solved virus structures to show exactly how viruses look in 3D.