Claire Roberston - 2017 SPIE Women in Optics Planner
Postdoctoral Fellow
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, USA
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Country of Birth: USA |
I work on how cells interact with the extracellular structural and functional scaffolding proteins called ECM. These proteins are interesting in that their microstructure can be as important to cell function as their composition. I’m looking to understand what environment these proteins provide to cells by using optical microscopy and developing techniques to study their biomechanics using light.
When I was first starting out, I wish someone had told me that it’s okay to be bad at things —everything gets better with practice and that the learning process is really integral to science. I would never have guessed at the things I’m working on now, or that I’d be good at or even capable of many of them.
Getting to work on problems at the forefront of science is remarkably fun! There is something incredibly satisfying in taking a problem which no one knows how to solve, coming up with hypothesis and methods to test them, and then finding out if you were right or wrong.