Science usually feels like a series of charts and cold, hard numbers. But for Hannah Somers, a Digital Image Analyst at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL), it's basically art. Honestly, if you saw her award-winning work, you wouldn't know if you were looking at a life-saving medical discovery or a piece of abstract expressionism hanging in a gallery in Portland.
Somers has carved out a unique space at the Bar Harbor institution. She isn't just "running a machine." She is the bridge between the invisible world of cellular biology and the human eye.
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Born and raised in Maine, she’s a Maine Maritime Academy grad who swapped the deck of a boat for the lens of a mesoSPIM light-sheet microscope. It’s a pretty wild career pivot. One day you're a Fisheries Observer with NOAA, and the next, you're the person researchers go to when they need to see exactly how a zebrafish’s brain develops in 3D.
The Science of Seeing: Hannah Somers and the MDIBL Mission
The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory isn't your typical lab. Since 1898, it’s been perched on the rugged coast of Salsbury Cove. They don't just study humans; they study things like "immortal" axolotls, tiny roundworms called C. elegans, and African turquoise killifish. Why? Because these animals have secrets about regeneration and aging that humans lost a long time ago.
Hannah Somers joined the lab in 2020. She started as a research assistant in Jarod Rollins’s lab, focusing on how intermittent fasting might help us live longer. But it was her talent for microscopy that really made her stand out.
Most people think of a microscope as that clunky thing from high school biology. The tools Somers uses are different. We’re talking about confocal microscopes like the Zeiss LSM 980 and the Nikon Ti-E. These machines use lasers to slice through living tissue without actually cutting it.
Why the mesoSPIM Matters
Somers is one of the primary operators of the mesoSPIM (mesoscale selective plane illumination microscopy).
- It’s one of only a handful in the entire country.
- It allows for "3D whole-organ imaging."
- It lets scientists see an entire organism—like a zebrafish—in high resolution while it's still intact.
Basically, it’s like having a Google Earth for the inside of a body. Instead of looking at a flat, dead slice of tissue under a slide, Somers creates a 3D map where you can fly through the blood vessels of a brain or the tubules of a kidney.
Winning Big: The 2025 Nikon Small World Recognition
In late 2025, Somers hit a major milestone. Her visualization of a zebrafish’s vascular system was recognized in the Nikon Small World competition. This is the Oscars of microscopy.
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The image wasn't just a "cool photo." It was a byproduct of serious research in Laboratory President Hermann Haller’s group. They were looking at ways to fix and preserve blood vessels in vertebrates. Somers took that raw data and turned it into something National Geographic wanted to feature.
"I realized how beautiful they were," she said about the images. "People could really see it’s a fish and not just a closeup of tissues."
That’s the core of what she does. She makes the abstract tangible. When a donor or a student looks at her work, they aren't just seeing "vascular rarefaction"—they’re seeing the intricate, glowing branches of life. It makes the science feel real.
Publications and Research Impact
It's not all about the pretty pictures, though. Somers is a co-author on several heavy-hitting papers. Her work on protein translation in C. elegans (published in Cell Reports Methods) used fluorescence microscopy to quantify how cells make protein in real-time.
She’s also been involved in studies regarding:
- Kidney aging: Using the African turquoise killifish to see how microvasculature breaks down over time.
- SGLT2 Inhibition: Researching how certain drugs might preserve kidney health as we get older.
- Vascular development: Working on kidney organoids—basically mini-kidneys grown in a lab.
A Passion Rooted in the Maine Coast
Somers’s path to the MDI Biological Laboratory feels very full-circle. Growing up in Maine, she was the kid who spent hours looking at bugs, worms, and sea glass. Her grandfather sent her a small microscope when she was young, and that was it. She was hooked.
She brings a photographer's eye to her scientific work. This isn't just a job; it’s a calling. She’s been vocal about how important research funding is for Maine, noting that institutions like MDIBL are the "lifeblood of progress" for the state.
She actually met her fiancé at the lab. For her, the lab isn't just a workplace—it’s a community. It’s a place where a kid from Maine can stay in Maine and do world-class, cutting-edge science.
What You Can Learn from the MDIBL Approach
If you’re interested in the intersection of tech and biology, Hannah Somers’s work at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory offers a few actionable takeaways:
- Don't ignore the "Art" in STEM: Scientific communication is often boring. Using high-end imaging to make data beautiful is how you get people to care about your research.
- Look at Model Organisms: You don't always need to study humans to solve human problems. The transparency of a zebrafish or the short lifespan of a killifish provides data you simply can't get elsewhere.
- Invest in Imaging: If you're in the biotech space, the bottleneck is often seeing the results. Tools like the mesoSPIM are changing the game by providing 3D context that 2D slides miss.
Hannah Somers is proving that you don't need to be in a massive city like Boston or San Francisco to change the world of medicine. Sometimes, all you need is a very powerful laser, a tiny fish, and a perspective shaped by the Maine coast.
Actionable Next Steps:
If you want to follow in these footsteps or support this kind of work, look into the Maine INBRE program, which helps students and researchers get access to the high-end microscopy facilities at MDIBL. You can also explore the annual Nikon Small World galleries to see how digital image analysts are turning raw data into public-facing science education.