Rick grew up in the Southern California area and completed his BS in Marine Biology at California State University, Long Beach. His research project was to determine marine grazing rates of parasitic copepods based on differing eco environments. He also obtained a minor in Geology.

Prior to joining Zeiss, he was a research technician at Chevron working in the Oil Exploration Biostratigraphy group using siliceous microfossils as timeline markers for offshore exploration. During this time, he used light and electron microscopy to identify species of importance in creating these appearance/extinction timelines.

Sebastian Barreto Ortiz is currently an Automated Product Application Sales Specialist focused on the ZEISS Celldiscoverer 7 and the Axioscan 7 systems. Sebastian earned his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in Chemical and Biomolecular engineering, where he worked in vascular tissue engineering fabricating small artificial blood vessels in vitro. Here he developed his love for microscopy, which was the main analysis technique to study the organization of the microvessels he generated

Prior to joining ZEISS, Geert did his Ph.D. work at the University of California Berkeley in the Molecular and Cell Biology department. He completed his thesis research in the lab of Dr. David Bilder, using extensive confocal and widefield microscopy techniques to study novel mechanisms of epithelial ligand-receptor interactions and tumor suppressor genes in Drosophila. His enthusiasm for microscopy started during undergrad in the lab of Prof. Sander Van Den Heuvel at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, performing live imaging of cell division in C. elegans.

Geert welcomes the opportunity to speak with you to learn more about your current research requirements, imaging projects and challenges, and share with you some of the recent, unique enhancements to ZEISS Microscopy solutions.

Prior to joining ZEISS Kevin O’Keefe completed his Ph.D. at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he gained extensive experience in widefield, confocal microscopy and image analysis with a focus on tissue multiplexing following injury in the mouse submandibular salivary gland. After graduating Kevin started his career at ZEISS as a Product Application Sales Specialist and covered NY, NJ and PA working with ZEISS hardware including advanced 3D imaging systems. Recently, Kevin has joined the software sales team as the Senior Software Sales Representative with a concentration in biotech and pharma. He focuses on using the ZEISS toolkit for image analysis including ZEN, APEER and Arivis to help translate images into actionable data.

My name is Torey and I go by all gender pronouns. I am a biologist at heart and studied cell-cell interactions and mechanics for my Ph.D. work at the University of Michigan and Post-Docs at University of Michigan and Boston College. I love using advanced microscopy techniques to understand how cells function and impact our daily lives. It would be my honor to learn more about your science goals and to provide information and microscopy solutions.