Microscopes are not like other pieces of lab instrumentation: they do not make measurements for you like a pH meter, spectrophotometer, or DNA sequencer. Microscopes are sophisticated instruments that enable scientists to examine specimens and acquire data in the form of images. The scientist is an essential element of the process. Well-trained microscopists can acquire highly informative data and beautiful images; poorly-trained microscope “users” might generate good data and images, but might also generate poor, misleading, or even entirely false images. The purpose of our training program is to help you be a good microscopist, not a “user” who just knows how to push the right buttons.

The primers in this “book” are intended to prepare you for the in-person portion of the training. Not all the chapters may be relevant for your training; only read the assigned chapters.

Note about the limitations of this text: These primers were created to be part of the user training for the James Madison University (JMU) Light Microscopy and Imaging Facility, a multi-user core research facility. They are not intended to be comprehensive. JMU is a primarily undergraduate institution and undergraduates constitute the vast majority of the facility’s users. These primers were therefore written at an undergraduate level and without assuming any prior college-level microscopy, optics, physics, mathematics, and computational experience. They are also condensed and focus primarily on essential concepts so as to not overwhelm the reader, an approach that is supported by current pedagogical research^[1]. Experts will notice many generalizations and omitted details. Some concepts are covered during the in-person portion of the training.