New course teaches undergraduate, master's and PhD students to use electron microscope

Brandeis Stories

New course teaches undergraduate, master's and PhD students to use electron microscope

By David Levin
April 14, 2026

In a basement lab in Brandeis' Rosenstiel building, a refrigerator-sized microscope dominates a small, windowless room. On its surface, it looks like a featureless white box. Yet inside, it's a study in extremes: fed by liquid nitrogen, the scope runs at nearly 300 degrees below zero fahrenheit and can visualize structures as small as a single protein.

This device, called a Tundra cryo-electron microscope, enables one of the most advanced imaging techniques in modern biology. Funded by a $1.7M grant from the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation program, the Tundra arrived at Brandeis a year and a half ago - and this spring, the instrument has become a classroom.

A new course by Alex Johnson, an assistant professor in the biochemistry department, is not only teaching students the finer points of molecular biology, but giving them hands-on experience with one of the field's most powerful tools. The class, called Bacterial Toxins, is open to students of all levels, with three undergraduates, two master's students and three PhD candidates all learning to operate the same machine.

Amaya Logan '27 is one of those undergraduates. A junior in Johnson's lab, she'd spent months studying a protein that may help researchers understand Parkinson's disease, but until taking this course, had been unable to figure out its structure in detail. The Tundra microscope changed that.

"Here, I'm not just able to visualize my protein. I'm actually learning how it works. That part is all up in the air until you sit down and do the microscopy,'' she says, "and using an electron microscope is not typically something that you let undergrads do, period.''

Johnson is candid about what his students' access means. "It's expensive. It's advanced. But this gives them a chance to get involved much earlier than I would have initially thought possible,'' he says.

For Logan, who plans to apply to PhD programs next year, the equipment matters - but so does who else is in the room. By working alongside masters' and PhD-level students, she says, she's also had the benefit of learning advanced hard and soft skills directly from her classmates.

"Hearing about creative techniques that they've used in experiments is really useful, but also just seeing how they carry themselves - It's been really cool to see their presentation skills and hear the deeply intellectual questions that they come up with," she says.

Access to cryo-electron microscopy is rarely this democratic. At most institutions, undergraduates simply don't get near equipment like this. But at Brandeis, faculty like Johnson are willing - and able - to build courses that open those doors, giving students access to tools and expertise they'd be unlikely to find anywhere else.

"There's something unique about Brandeis that makes a course like this possible," says Johnson.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2319804. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.