The Barad lab uses cellular cryo-electron tomography (CryoET) to look inside cells and see their membranes directly — no fixation, no stains, no labels. Freeze a cell fast enough and everything stays where it was: membranes, filaments, and protein complexes, all still in place. We want to understand how barrier tissues, the sheets of cells that hold an organism apart from the world, are built at that scale and what happens when something gets through. We start with the gut epithelium and the pathogens that breach it, and we build the computational tools that turn a tomogram into something we can actually measure.
We do not always have a position formally advertised, but that has never been the real constraint — if this sounds like work you want to do, please get in touch.