Alison North, Ph.D.

North joined The Rockefeller University in 2000 to establish and direct its Bio-Imaging Resource Center, one of the world’s most comprehensive facilities for state-of-the-art microscopy and scientific imaging. North, a cell biologist whose research has included using immunoelectron microscopy to study muscle defects caused by Duchenne muscular dystrophy and ultrastructural studies of the cellular organization of epidermal cell–cell junctions, advises and trains hundreds of researchers from Rockefeller and other institutions in a wide variety of optical microscopy techniques.

A native of Yorkshire, UK, she was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge and received her doctorate from Oxford University. She undertook postdoctoral research in Salzburg and then Manchester, where she was later awarded a Wellcome Trust Career Development fellowship. North’s images and movies have been exhibited worldwide, including in science exhibits at the International Center of Photography in New York and on the public television science series Nova. She has also acted as a judge for both the Olympus BioScapes and Nikon Small World photomicrography competitions. She has published several highly cited educational reviews on microscopy and is currently the co-director of the annual Optical Microscopy course held at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She is also co-chair of the recently established BioImaging North America (BINA) network of imaging scientists across the USA, Canada, and Mexico.