The Biological Electron Microscope Facility (BEMF) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM) is located 2400 miles over water from the next nearest research university. BEMF is a multi-user core facility, administered by the Pacific Biomedical Research Center (PBRC), an organized research unit at the UHM. The mission of the BEMF is to provide state-of-the-art instrumentation, services and training for electron microscopy to the biomedical and biological researchers in Hawai‘i and the Pacific region. The BEMF was established in 1984 under the direction of Dr. Richard D. Allen, and has since grown steadily in its instrumentation, expertise, and use. In the past 5 years it has served researchers from over 50 laboratories in PBRC and the colleges of Natural Sciences, Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, Engineering, Medicine, and Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology, as well as visiting investigators from other Hawai‘i, mainland and foreign institutions.

The BEMF has a full line of instrumentation for conventional transmission and field emission scanning electron microscopy as well as a complete line of instruments for cryoelectron microscopy.