RMS Executive Committee
Peter O'Toole
Peter heads the Imaging and Cytometry Labs within the Technology Facility at the University of York which includes an array of confocal microscopes, flow cytometers and electron microscopes. Peter gained his PhD in the Cell Biophysics Laboratory at the University of Essex and has been involved in many aspects of fluorescence imaging. Research is currently focused on both technology and method development of novel probes and imaging modalities.
Peter has ongoing collaborations with many leading microscopy and cytometry companies and his group also provides research support to many academics and commercial organisations. Peter is also heavily involved with teaching microscopy and flow cytometry which includes organising and teaching on both the RMS Light Microscopy Summer School and the RMS Practical Flow Cytometry courses.
Grace Burke
Grace, Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester, is INL Laboratory Fellow at the Idaho National Laboratory, where she is scientific lead for reactor structural materials, having previously been Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. From 2011 through 2021, Grace was the Director of the Materials Performance Centre and Professor of Materials Performance in the School of Materials at the University of Manchester. She was also Director of the Electron Microscopy Centre from 2012 through 2016. Grace is a physical metallurgist for whom microstructural characterisation has always represented an integral and fundamental component of research into materials performance. She obtained her BS in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and her PhD in Metallurgy from Imperial College of Science and Technology where her SCC research work included analytical, high voltage and in situ electron microscopy. Grace then joined the US Steel Research Laboratory where she conducted research on ferrous alloys including the use of atom probe field-ion microscopy as a complementary technique to AEM in the investigation of commercially important materials.
Subsequently, Grace joined the Westinghouse Science & Technology Centre where she applied of combinations of AEM and APFIM techniques to a broader range of nuclear and power generation materials. In 1994 she moved to the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in order to focus her research on the environment-sensitive behaviour of engineering alloys in nuclear reactors, and, in 2009, was the first woman to be promoted to the highest scientific position, Consultant.
At Manchester and her subsequent positions, Grace has continued her to employ her established portfolio of advanced techniques to address a range of materials issues to investigate precursor reactions of material degradation liquids and gases, and irradiation-induced behaviour. Grace was the 2005 President of the Microscopy Society of America and has been a Fellow of RMS since 1988. She is also a Fellow of ASM International, the Microscopy Society of America, the Microanalysis Society, IOM3 (UK), and TMS (USA).
Rik Brydson
Rik holds a chair in the Institute for Materials Research (IMR) in the School of Process Environmental and Materials Engineering at the University of Leeds. He heads the NanoCharacterisation group based around the Leeds Electron Microscopy and Spectroscopy (LEMAS) centre which is shared between Materials and Earth Sciences and also acts as an EPSRC facility for external UK researchers. He has a general research interest in high spatial resolution chemical analysis in nanostructured materials, and has a current research h index of 32 with over 25 years research experience in nanomaterials characterisation. He has managed extensive national and international collaborations including being current consortium leader for the UK National Facility for Aberration corrected Electron Microscopy, SuperSTEM at Daresbury.
Rik is also on the Management Board of the European Microscopy Society. He has written an RMS Handbook on Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (Bios /Taylor and Francis 2001), has co-written a book on “Nanoscale Science and Technology" (Wiley 2005), edited a recent RMS book on Analytical Aberration-corrected Transmission Electron Microscopy with Wiley and has contributed a number of other chapters in specialist books on electron microscopy by other professional bodies covering Physics, Chemistry and Engineering. In recent years his research interests have focused on applying high spatial resolution characterisation methods (particularly TEM and EELS) to the nanochemical analysis of softer, more radiation sensitive materials.
Michelle Peckham
Michelle is Professor of Cell Biology in the Faculty of Biological Sciences. She obtained a BA in Physiology of Organisms at the University of York, and a PhD in Physiology at University College London. She moved to King's College London, and started to use a specialised form of light microscopy (birefringence) to investigate muscle crossbridge orientation. She then worked at UCSF, San Francisco for a year, where she used fluorescence polarisation to investigate muscle crossbridges. She moved back to the UK, to the University of York, to work on insect flight muscle. In 1990 she was awarded a Royal Society University Research fellowship, based at King's College London, and began working on the cell and molecular biology of muscle development, and started to use live cell imaging to investigate muscle cell behaviour in cultured cells, and confocal microscopy to investigate their cytoskeleton. She collaborated with Graham Dunn to use Digitally Recorded Interference Microscopy with Automatic Phase Shifting (DRIMAPS) to investigate cell crawling behaviour. She moved to Leeds in 1997 as a Lecturer, and has continued to use a wide range of both light and electron microscopy approaches to investigate the molecular motors and the cytoskeleton.
Rod Shipley
Rod has recently retired from his role at Thermo Fisher Scientific where he lead the Sales and Service Organisations as VP & Senior Director for over nine years in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Rod is a qualified Metallurgist and spent 13 years in Industry in a variety of roles culminating in heading the analysis department responsible for carrying out residual stress analysis on aerospace bearings for their main customer at Rolls Royce. It was from this position that he took his first steps into a commercial role in 1991 with Philips Analytical X-Ray responsible for XRD & XRF Sales in the Midlands and South West of England before switching to become the UK Sales Manager with FEI Electron Optics in 1998.
Maddy Parsons
Maddy is Professor of Cell Biology at King’s College London. Maddy completed her PhD in Biochemistry within the Department of Medicine at University College London in 2000. During her PhD she analysed the role of mechanical forces in dermal scarring. She then moved to Cancer Research UK laboratories in London for a 4-year postdoctoral position where she used advanced microscopy techniques including FRET/FLIM to dissect adhesion receptor signaling to the actin cytoskeleton and how this controlled directed cell invasion. Based on these achievements, Maddy was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2005 to establish her own group within the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics at King’s College London.
Following completion of her fellowship, Maddy was appointed Reader at King’s in 2013 and Professor of Cell Biology in 2015. Maddy has established collaborations with developmental biologists and clinical researchers to study adhesion receptor signalling in skin blistering, wound healing, inflammation and cancer. She works closely with physicists, biophysicists and other world-leading cell migration groups in the field to develop and apply new imaging technologies to dissect spatiotemporal cytoskeletal signalling events in live cells, tissues and whole organisms. As a result of her interest and applications of advanced microscopy, Maddy developed a strong working partnership with Nikon, which subsequently led to the establishment of the state-of-the-art, world-class Nikon Imaging Centre at King’s College London of which she is Director. Maddy also currently works alongside other biotech and pharmaceutical companies to develop and apply advanced imaging approaches to basic mechanisms that underpin drug discovery.
Andy Brown
Andy is a Professor in the School of Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Leeds and has a background in the application of analytical transmission electron microscopy to the characterization of materials, focusing more recently on nanoparticles and beam sensitive materials.
Kerry Thompson
Kerry is a Lecturer in Anatomy at the University of Galway since 2017. She is the Programme Director for the newly established MSc in Microscopy & Imaging at Galway. In 2010 she was awarded her PhD for a microscopy heavy research project which focused on structure function relations in the human endometrium. In 2011 she began work as a Postdoctoral Microscopy Facility Scientist in the Centre for Microscopy and Imaging (CMI) in Galway and was a key member in its establishment.
In the 2014/2015 academic year Kerry acted as a project lead in the “Under the Microscope” Programme, which brought the Microscope Activity Kits from the RMS into Irish Primary Schools for the first time. Following this Kerry was elected on the Outreach & Education Committee of the RMS. With the support of both the RMS and the Microscopy Society of Ireland, the team continue to visit schools all over Ireland and partake in outreach events. In 2018 she succeed Prof Susan Anderson as the Honorary Secretary of Outreach and Education of the RMS. Her current research is focused on the development of correlative light and advanced electron microscopy techniques and technologies. She is keenly involved in the acquisition of microscopy related research infrastructure, and the development of adequate training and career progression pathways for Imaging Scientists and Core Facility Staff.