Dr Kirsty MacLellan-Gibson
Dr MacLellan-Gibson is the head of biological imaging and has been working for NIBSC for over 5 years. Since the beginning, she has been responsible for running the Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) projects as the laboratory supervisor for the TEM/SEM lab and prep lab area. Dr Kirsty has introduced advanced imaging technologies and techniques, such as image processing for data classification and cryo electron microscopy of vitreous sections (CEMOVIS). She has also been responsible for or heavily involved in the organisation, teaching and running of the imaging department courses. These courses include the CEMOVIS course, NIBSC cryo-workshop, Structural and Computational Biomedical Informatics and the Cryo-EM Workshop. She has built strong collaborations internally including for the Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMV) and Influenza projects. She has developed external collaborations with Birkbeck, NIMR and UCL and continued to reinforce industrial relationships with suppliers and manufacturers such as JEOL, Gatan and Leica. During this time Dr Kirsty’s work has contributed towards the successful award of MRC and BBSRC grants, two international poster prizes ) and publications.
As a senior postdoctoral assistant for the Institute de minéralogy et de Physics des Milieux Condensés at University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, Dr Kirsty worked with Dr Nicolas Boisset and collaborated with Dr. Davide Prangishvili, Institut Pasteur,on the three-dimensional structures of helical filamentous viruses.
As postdoctoral assistant at the Laboratiore d’Analyse Ultrastructural, founded by Prof. Jacques Dubochet in the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, she performed CEMOVIS on numerous systems, working within the group or with Dr Bruno Humbel. Here she lectured undergraduate and post graduate students on image processing methods and trained visiting scientists to perform CEMOVIS. Dr Kirsty also worked with Dr. Mikhail Eltsov to investigate the structure of chromatin organisation by CEMOVIS in pro and eukaryotic cells. She has completed an intensive course on electron tomography (TOM Software Toolbox: Acquisition and Analysis for Electron Tomography).