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| The high-tech look of UAB's Scanning Electron Microscope facility makes it a popular spot on campus tours, but the machine's ability to image everything from exotic metals to living tissues makes it an invaluable research tool, says facility director William Stonewall Monroe (above). |
When you need to see something so tiny that light skips right over it—and you don't want it vacuum-sealed and messed with in the way that a transmission electron microscope requires—you're in the market for a scanning electron microscope (SEM).
An SEM is the go-to machine for materials engineers, who are very interested in close-up pictures of faulty pipes or the inner workings of exotic, lab-created composites. That's why UAB's SEM is located on the ground floor of the School of Engineering. But the device is also gaining a following with researchers all over campus, says William Stonewall Monroe, director of the UAB Scanning Electron Microscope facility.
"If you want to look inside something, you use a transmission electron microscope," Monroe says. "That's what most people think of as an electron microscope. But the samples have to be elaborately prepared and able to survive the vacuum conditions."
