Core curriculum: learning to manage a shared microscopy facility

It’s the long wait for equipment that H. Krishnamurthy remembers from his master’s studies at Bangalore University in India. “I used to stand in line to get my turn to use a rusted hammer to nail [down] a frog for dissection,” he says.

Today, Krishnamurthy directs a facility so that other researchers in Bengaluru and throughout India need never experience that lack of access. The Central Imaging and Flow Cytometry Lab at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru “has helped scientists to take their research to next level”, he says. “Before I started this facility, there was no paper published in Cell from India.” Since then, users have published more than half a dozen papers in Cell, as well as others in journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.