Josh Edwards

PhD student

About Me


I studied for an MPhys in physics at the Univeristy of Kent from 2015-2019. During this time I completed two internships in the Micron Bioimaging facility at Oxford Univeristy developing python code to asses abberations in adaptive optics systems and to identify regions of interest in biological samples using machine learining. For my masters project I joined Kent's Applied Optics Group where I worked on a remote focusing infra-red optical coherence microscope for the optical biopsy of skin cancers.

During my PhD I have developed advanced microscopes including leading the LifeHack microscope project.

I have a strong passion for open science and so all of my work is available through the LifeHack microscope website and the Holden Lab GitHub

My Projects


LifeHack Microscope

The LifeHack microscope is an open-source microscopy project capable of SMLM and live cell imaging surpassing existing commercial systems. It is intended to be equally useful as designed or as a development platform from which to build specialised systems to solve cutting edge problems.

The microscope is constructed from commercially available and 3D printed parts to simplify the build process and comprehensive parts lists, CAD files, and build/setup instructions are available through a custom website to allow straightforward construction of the microscope.

ImLock Sample Stabilisation

ImLock is an infra-red, image based, 3D microscope drift correction tool. It operates as a micromanager plugin and with minimal additional hardware making it addible to any system. Using a hybrid live/post-hoc correction technique I have been able to achieve long term sample stability of ~5nm in Z and ~2nm in X and Y.

The code is available on GitHub here and detailed documentation can be found here.