Carolyn Larabell's Biography

Carolyn Larabell, Professor, University of California San Francisco

Carolyn Larabell holds a joint position as Professor in the Department of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, and Faculty Scientist in the Physical Biosciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is also the Director of the UCSF/LBNL National Center for X-ray Tomography. Dr. Larabell received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 1988 and did postdoctoral training at Stanford University and at the University of California at Davis. She has been at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1990, was appointed as the Advanced Light Source Professor at LBNL in 1999 and as Professor in the Department of Anatomy at UCSF in 2000. Dr. Larabell’s research interests center on the development of novel imaging techniques and their application to cell and developmental biology, including events involved with chromatin organization during cell differentiation. She has extensive experience with a variety of imaging technologies including electron microscopy; freeze-fracture and quick-freeze, deep-etch, rotary-shadow TEM; confocal and multiphoton microscopy, and super-resolution fluorescence microscopy. Since 1997 she has been leading the efforts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to develop soft x-ray microscopy for imaging biological cells. In 2004 she established the National Center for X-ray Tomography (NCXT), which is a National Institutes of Health Biomedical Technology Research Center, jointly funded by the NIH and the Biological and Environmental Research Division of the Department of Energy.