Introduction to cheap field microscopy for the general public and citizen science.

From cell phone macro lenses to origami based microscopes, the landscape of accessible tools for getting a closer look at the world is changing quickly. This talk will survey some of the development of these tools and look at how they are currently being used in citizen science and classrooms. Many of these tools, most beneath $20, will be available to play with and a small portion of time will be spent looking at what new tools are lingering on the horizon.

Damon Tighe works for Bio-Rad Laboratories as a Curriculum and Training Specialist helping bring hands on biotechnology into classrooms. He also moonlights as a Naturalist for the California Center of Natural History. He spent many sleepless night behind a Zeiss Axio Observer fluorescent scope while working at the National Lab's Joint Genome Institute on isolating single unculturalbe microbial cells for whole genome sequencing.