Electron Microscopy Spring School 2026

Louie Aspinall

University of Leeds

Louie carried out his PhD in TEM characterisation of DNA binding proteins at the University of Glasgow, where he found his love for TEM. He is currently working as a Technician in Electron Microscopy at the University of Leeds. He frequents in both negative stain TEM and cryoEM, and has a particular interest in methods development.

John Harrington

University of Leeds

John Harrington is the Facility Manager of the Leeds Electron Microscopy and Spectroscopy centre (LEMAS) in the faculty of Engineering.  He has taught on the EM school for many years, firstly as a technician and then as an Experimental Officer.  He has over 30 years of EM experience and expertise particularly in SEM, EDX and FIB-SEM dual beam technologies.

Nicole Hondow

University of Leeds

Nicole is an Associate Professor in the area of Materials Characterisation at the University of Leeds. Prior to this she completed undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Chemistry at The University of Western Australia, and undertook postdoctoral research University of Leeds in the electron microscopy of materials relevant to catalysis and toxicology. Nicole’s current research uses analytical electron microscopy in the examination and quantification of nanomaterials in complex matrices. She is particularly interested in applying cryogenic approaches to capture nano- and soft-materials in the native state, with analysis by analytical (S)TEM and FIB-SEM.

Tom O'Sullivan

University of Leeds

I’m Tom, a cryo correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) scientist at Leeds University. Cryo-EM is conventionally used to look at single, isolated and purified particles such as protein or viruses. However, whilst single particle experiments are a powerful tool for structural biology, it fails to show how proteins are structured or behave in their cellular environment.

However, visualising structures within tissue or cells can be tough. Importantly, structures are sporadic within tissue, and high resolution electron imaging requires a small field of view. My job is to use cryo CLEM workflows to identify and isolate regions of interest for cryo-electron tomography.