Dr. Anne-Marie Ladouceur appointed Assistant Director Training & Education
The Advanced BioImaging Facility (ABIF) at McGill University is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Anne-Marie Ladouceur to the newly created position of Assistant Director of Training & Education.
Dr. Ladouceur completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the supervision of Dr. Paul Maddox. She developed tremendous skills as a cell and developmental biologist and became an expert in live-cell quantitative optical imaging. She discovered that mitotic chromosomes scale in length to cell and nuclear size during chromosome compaction in the early developing C. elegans embryo. Her skills were refined and expanded to new areas at the Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, where she gained expertise imaging diverse samples from unicellular yeast to multi-cellular sea creature embryos. During her postdoctoral work with Dr. Stephanie Webber at McGill University she identified novel membrane-less small RNA polymerase organelle structures in bacteria through liquid-liquid phase separation imaging. Work that is now published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, PMID: 32675239).
Dr. Ladouceur brought her breadth of experience with model organisms and microscopy technologies to the ABIF in 2019 when she was hired as an imaging scientist. Since then, she has performed hundreds of one-on-one training sessions with researchers from diverse fields including Engineering, Biology, Physiology and Neuroscience. She rapidly gained skills in sample preparation, image acquisition and image analysis and is the resident expert in light sheet microscopy.
As the ABIF expands with new imaging scientists and new principal investigators accessing the facility with new research programs, Dr. Ladouceur will lead the Training & Education program. As such, since 2020 she has been overseeing our new remote training program which has already allowed hundreds of scientists to access the ABIF, even in the time of physical distancing and limited access due to the pandemic. Her efforts have been essential in successfully securing research grants from NSERC, MITACS and McGill’s Innovation and Partnerships (I+P) program. The program has evolved into our new AI-powered flagship µToolboxes for training (µCompass), protection of advanced infrastructure (µShield) and rapid support for microscope users (µSupport).
This program is being expanded to all of the diverse microscopy infrastructure in the ABIF. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Anne-Marie Ladouceur into this new role as she continues to refine and expand our renowned curriculum in the ABIF training & education programs to support the McGill and broader research communities.