Carl A. Boswell
Staff Scientist

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Throughout my academic career, microscopy and imaging has played a role in essentially every project I've undertaken.  As a consequence it seems natural to have become a manager of several confocal microscope systems at the University of Arizona.  I oversee a Nikon PCM 2000, a Deltavison deconvolution instrument and a Zeiss 510 Meta confocal in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology; and another Nikon PCM 2000 at the Arizona Cancer Center. A new two-photon Advanced Intravital Microscope, based on a LaVision Biotec confocal microscope and built by Dr. Urs Utzinger is operational in the Bio5 Institute.

My primary goal in this position has been to become as conversant as possible in the myriad languages of imaging while passing on my enthusiasm for imaging technology and nifty pictures to new microscopists.  Over the years I've had experience with a number of image analysis packages (Metamorph, NIH Image, Simple PCI), deconvolution (Autoquant), pH and Ca²⁺ ratio imaging (Metamorph) and confocal technology.  

In association with Dr. George McNamara, we developed an interactive website that displays spectra from a large database and calculates fluorescence efficiency of a virtual microscope. One of our next goals it to provide the ability to calculate expected FRET intensity after selecting from a list of donor/acceptor pairs and the associated optical filters.  A simpler version of this spectral website, based on the capabilities of the NIkon PCM2000, can be found on the websites for the instruments noted above. Note that George has developed the world's largest publicly available database of fluorescent spectra . A newer version of the spectra website, oriented toward the hardware available for the Advanced Intravital Microscope is currently in the final stages of development.

Phone: 520-621-7560
Fax: 520-621-3709
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