To help new users, this page will help direct you to register, schedule an appointment, learn about our policies, and plan your experiment to increase our chances of success. The large majority of your questions will be answered somewhere on this website. Read below to help find where.
Please remember: Appointments must be made or canceled more than one day in advance.
Home
Check our home page often to get important up to date information about our facility. We sometimes have to change our policies, rates, or black out times. This will be posted here.
Guides
I have written and collected many guides to help users of all experiences. Becoming familiar with the information in these guides will help you succeed more quickly.
Registering
We require all users to fill out a registration form. It will help ensure your payments are on time, so you will not be blocked from using our facility. For that reason, it is critical that the correct information is filled out. Once this form is completed, mail it to thickman@rics.bwh.harvard.edu. It may also be a good idea to introduce yourself and explain what you're planning to learn.
Scheduling
Once registered with our facility, you must register on the scheduling website. This makes an online account for scheduling appointments. Follow this guide to make and edit your appointments.
As the guide notes: you must make or cancel your appointment more than a day in advance of your scheduled time. If you must cancel last minute, email Tyler. As you'll notice, we do not have a policy for appointments that end short of the scheduled time. We understand that experiments can fail or go awry, or go so well that all the data is collected in a very short time. Please help us keep this fairly lenient policy by scheduling only the time you need, with a little extra buffer time (rushing will usually lead to poor results). If your cells are fixed and mounted, you can always come back and finish collection later.
Sample Preparation
Refer to our guides section to learn how to correctly prepare your samples. If preparing your samples this way seems difficult or impossible, email.
Facility information
Wondering what our scope is capable of, what wavelengths are available, what our hours of operation are, etcetera? This page will answer many of those questions.
Links
Links sections are often overlooked. Doing so with our links section, however, would be a mistake. We have resources linked there that will help you choose the ideal fluorophore for our lasers, or learn about the advantages and limitations of our confocal and widefield microscopes, and more. Take a few seconds to look over our selected links and see what they have to offer.
Tech-assisted and Independent use
Many users rely on our scope for very high resolution or quantitative microscopy. We have several instruments which work independently with our system. There are seemingly endless ways to make adjustments to our instruments that can throw off our image collection until they are corrected. While we understand that many people have had significant prior experience with other microscopes, we only allow a select few frequent and very experienced users access the scope without technician assistance. Even these experienced users often require additional assistance for more complicated procedures. Please understand that while we do allow independent access, it takes time before this happens with new users.
