The Biosciences Electron Microscopy Facility at UBC has at present two TEMs, one SEM, two confocals. several fluorescent light microscopes and an above average amount of digital imaging equipment used p by graduate students. The facility supports the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Science and is run by a Director (myself) with one assistant. It is busy having an average of 600 individual users per year. The only way this number of users can be accommodated is by making them independent of staff. Training students had been previously on a one-to-one basis. This is very time consuming. Four years ago with no full time assistant, I decided to approach training in a different way. We started a confocal microscopy workshop aided by one PhD student.

We run a 1.5 day practical confocal workshop. It is one day as a group, giving the basic concept of confocal microscopy, and using the instrument from “this is how you switch the machine on” to “this is how you deal with the stack of images.”