Andrew Gu-Nguyen. Research tech/assistant in the Yang Lab @ OHSU by day and amateur microscopist by night. For professional and personal inquiries, you may reach me at minutesandmicronsATgmailDOTcom.
I took the images above while enrolled (in the best Developmental Biology course ever!) at Reed College. While spending some extensive time with zebrafish and other animals, I also became very fond of optical microscopy. Right now I'm a big fan of DIC (wish I could afford my own) and darkfield imaging. In the realm of fluorescence imaging, I've been fortunate enough to have experience with laser scanning confocal microscopy and light sheet micorscopy - 2P and super-resolved confocal imaging will be coming soon! One of my bucket list items as of now is to image something with SI-LSM. As a side note, you can find one of these images amongst the national finalists of the 2025 Wiki Science competition :)
My personal micrographs are taken with the Reichert Microstar IV. Interestingly, the scope I aqcuired has phase objectives but no accompanying condensor; I've been looking for one for a bit now, but to no avail. Please reach out if you have any leads or personally possess one you'd be willing to part ways with.
Marriage Ceremony
My lovely wife, Taya, and I got married on 10/23/2026 at the Multnomah County Courthouse in Portland Oregon. It was a wonderful day to share with our friends and family.
Favorite Figures and Pop-Sci Books
I've been really into popular science books lately and am enamored (albeit naive to the reality of) with the anecdotes and lore of Biology past and present. My two favorite "classic" papers of all time are the Operon paper by Jacob & Monad and the tour de force Heidelberg screen paper by Nusslein-Volhard & Wieschaus. As for pop-sci, my favorites have been Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Your Inner Fish, and An Immense World. I'm currently enjoying Time, Love and Memory. To read list: I Contain Multitudes, The Eigth Day of Creation, Images and Understanding, Chance and Necessity, Braiding Sweetgrass, Lab Girl: a Memoir, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, and Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex. I also happen to love most things Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park will forever rock!
Bio Is, and has Been for a Long Time, Beyond Science Fiction
With the recent Nobel Prize being awarded to optogenetics this year, I've been talking alot with people in my life about how powerful basic science can be. These conversations I have with family and friends, who often don't care for basic biological research, have made me wonder about what else is there that biologists do which may come off as "science fictiony" to the outsider looking in. I sometimes imagine how learning about things like recombinases or DREADDS at an earlier age may have inspired me to be a biologist sooner, but maybe these types of things are meant to be gated behind the curriculum of highschool and introductory biology. It is certaintly the case that these technologies and their development are all the more compelling with a solid understanding of introductory biology and a love for the history of science. For the time being, I've been coming up with a list of technologies that my 15 year old self might have been captivated by; perhaps I will write about them soon for my own fulfillment. Topics: tissue clearing, antero/retrograde tracing, channel rhodopsin, GAL4-UAS, FLP-FRT, CRE-LOX, WISH, mono/polyclonal antibodies, balancer & polytene chromosomes, immortalized cell lines, transposons, fluorescent proteins, Yamanaka factors & organoids, fluroescence microscopy, microsurgeries (with needles, lasers, and by hand), Beta-galactosidase, super-resolution imaging, plasmid design, atomic gardening, and agrobacterium. I think these technologies, and the stories of their discovery, development, and applications all have such charm! Feel free to email me with more interesting stuff, but do notice how I avoided anything related to bioinformatics in that list. That stuff still mysticizes me, but I'm getting better about facing my fears every day!