OSE Seminar by Dr. Chitra Shaji on Light-Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy and Oblique Plane Microscopy

Departmental News

Dr. Ali Rastegari

Posted: November 11, 2025

Date: Thursday, November 13, 2025

Time: 12:30 PM to 1:45 PM

Location:  PAIS, Room 2540 and Zoom

Speaker:Dr. Chitra Shaji, UNM Physics and Astronomy Department

Abstract:

Optical microscopy is a powerful and evolving tool that allows us to visualize and understand the fine details of cells, tissues, and living organisms. Fluorescence microscopy uses laser excitation to excite fluorophores, whose emitted light is collected and imaged using a camera. Light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) uses a thin sheet of light to illuminate the sample being imaged, reducing photobleaching and enabling fast, clear, three-dimensional imaging of live specimens. Oblique plane microscopy (OPM) is a light-sheet microscopy technique that uses a tilted light sheet and a single objective for both illumination and detection, simplifying the setup compared to a traditional dual-objective light-sheet microscope. In this talk, she will briefly introduce light-sheet fluorescence microscopy, followed by our recent research on the development of a multiscale OPM system capable of imaging across a large field-of-view and high-resolution.

Biography:

Chitra Shaji is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Physics Department at the University of New Mexico, where she has been working for nearly two years in the Chakraborty Lab on the development of advanced light-sheet microscopy systems. More recently, she has also been assisting Prof. Keith Lidke in managing the Microscope Core Facility of the Physics department, supporting users and maintaining advanced imaging systems within the department. Before joining UNM, she held postdoctoral positions at Vanderbilt University and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where she worked on polarisation-sensitive Raman spectroscopy and Mueller-matrix polarimetry for biomedical diagnostics. She earned her Ph.D. from Pondicherry University,  India, where she developed and implemented Stokes–Mueller polarimetric techniques for linear and nonlinear optical studies.