James Fitzpatrick, Ph.D., joined the School of Medicine on June 1st 2015 as the inaugural Scientific Director of the Washington University Center for Cellular Imaging (WUCCI) and as an Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology & Physiology. He was promoted to Full Professor in 2019 and was awarded a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Imaging Scientist award in 2020. Prior to his relocation to Washington University, he was Senior Director of Biophotonics and Strategic Technology Initiatives at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA.
Dr. Fitzpatrick completed his undergraduate studies in Chemistry at Kings College, London and undertook graduate training in optical physics at the University of Bristol also in the United Kingdom. During his Ph.D. he designed and developed a novel injection seeded optical parametric oscillator (OPO) laser system for the study of nuclear hyperfine structure in the excited electronic states of gas phase free radical species. After completing his doctorate at the University of Bristol, he moved to the United States as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. There he shifted his focus to study biological molecules such as peptide mimics and their micro-solvated clusters in the gas-phase using high-resolution fluorescence spectroscopy. In his second post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University, also in Pittsburgh, he spent his time studying protein-protein interactions using tools such as fluorescence microscopy and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). After completing his post-doctoral training, he joined the Carnegie Mellon National Technology Center for Networks and Pathways, an NIH funded Roadmap initiative whose mandate was to develop fluorescent probe and imaging informatics technologies to study networks and pathways in living cells.
Dr. Fitzpatrick’s primary research interests lie in the integration and application of multi-scale optical and charged particle imaging technologies — specifically, biological applications of ion microscopy, development of correlative 3D light and electron microscopy approaches, and new computational tools to visualize and manipulate large-scale multi-dimensional datasets.
