Jennifer Waters, Ph.D.

Jennifer Waters received her PhD in Biology from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1998, where she used live quantitative fluorescence microscopy to study mitosis in Dr. Ted Salmon’s lab. After several years of teaching graduate-level optical microscopy courses at Wake Forest University, she joined HMS in 2001 to contribute to the establishment of the Nikon Imaging Center, a core facility dedicated to supporting imaging research. In 2024, reflecting an evolution in its mission and the culmination of a productive partnership with Nikon, the facility was renamed the Core for Imaging Technology & Education (CITE). This change underscores the core's expanded focus on advanced imaging technologies and educational outreach.

Jennifer and her team advise and train researchers on imaging experimental design and execution, and teach microscopy courses and workshops. She also organizes an annual two-week course on Quantitative Imaging at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (since 2011), and received a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Imaging Scientist award in 2019. She has authored multiple educational articles and reviews on quantitative microscopy, edited the book “Quantitative Imaging in Cell Biology” with Torsten Wittmann (UCSF) and creates microscopy educational videos for her YouTube channel “Microcourses”.