Professor Michelle Peckham Elected as new President of RMS

On Friday 30 September at the RMS AGM during the Microscopy: Advances, Innovation, Impact meeting, Professor Peter Nellist stepped down as President of the Royal Microscopical Society. After being unanimously voted in by the RMS Council and approved by RMS members at the AGM, Professor Michelle Peckham from the University of Leeds, is now the new President of the Society. Professor Nellist passed the Medal worn by RMS Presidents onto Professor Peckham at the RMS AGM.

Professor Michelle Peckham is Professor of Cell Biology in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the University of Leeds. She obtained a BA in Physiology of Organisms at the University of York, and a PhD in Physiology at University College London. She moved to King's College London, and started to use a specialised form of light microscopy (birefringence) to investigate muscle cross bridge orientation. She then worked at UCSF, San Francisco for a year, where she used fluorescence polarisation to investigate muscle cross bridges. She then moved back to the UK, to the University of York, to work on insect flight muscle. In 1990 she was awarded a Royal Society University Research fellowship, based at King's College London, and began working on the cell and molecular biology of muscle development, and started to use live cell imaging to investigate muscle cell behaviour in cultured cells, and confocal microscopy to investigate their cytoskeleton. She collaborated with Graham Dunn to use Digitally Recorded Interference Microscopy with Automatic Phase Shifting (DRIMAPS) to investigate cell crawling behaviour. In 1997, she moved to Leeds as a Lecturer, and has continued to use a wide range of both light and electron microscopy approaches to investigate the molecular motors and the cytoskeleton.

Professor Peckham is well-known for her work with super-resolution microscopy and STORM as well as championing Women in Science, receiving a University of Leeds Women of Achievement Award earlier in 2016. In her previous years of service for the RMS in different roles, she has organised the Cell Imaging Techniques Course, Frontiers in Bioimaging meetings and more recently, the super-resolution workshops, the next one taking place immediately after mmc2017 on 7 July 2017.

Of her appointment, Professor Peckham said “I am really pleased and excited to become the new president of the RMS. I have been actively involved with the society since being co-opted as a member to the Cell Biology Section (now the Life Sciences Section), when the RMS kindly agreed to help us organise an Abercrombie meeting in Oxford, in 2007. This provided me with my first glimpse of how efficient and helpful the RMS was in organising meetings, and gradually I came to learn how each of the sections work to promote new meetings, workshops and so on to benefit the imaging community. Like for many of you I am sure, imaging is a key part of our research effort, and in my new role as president, I look forward to helping and supporting the RMS to enable you to keep in touch with the latest developments in imaging through meetings, courses and workshops, and of course, the Journal of Microscopy, and in making a case for the importance of microscopy wherever and whenever possible.”