Scott Lea, Ph.D

Dr. Scott Lea is the team lead for the Structural Biology team. He provides scientific and technical expertise and leadership, strategy, and scientific productivity of the bioimaging and microscopy capabilities and the Quiet Wing for advanced microscopy. 
Lea has more than 25 years of experience with research related to surface science and optical imaging. His focus areas are related to applying scanning probe, optical, and surface science tools to the study of biomolecules at surfaces, organic-inorganic interfaces, and geochemical processes. He oversees activities and instrumentation in the scanning probe microscopy laboratories and has led the development of a high-pressure atomic force microscope for in-situ imaging of geochemical transformations in supercritical CO2. Dr. Lea has also collaborated with the Raschke group at the University of Colorado Boulder/JILA on the development of a scanning infrared near-field optical microscope for high spatial resolution chemical imaging. He was the principal investigator (PI) on a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research (BER) project in the Bioimaging Technologies program developing multimodal chemical imaging instrumentation based on near-field scanning probe methods to study microbial interactions (2017-2019) and is currently the PI on a multimodal, multiscale imaging project in the DOE/BER Bioimaging Science program (2019-2021). These projects focus on developing a capability to help in the understanding of metabolic connections in plant and microbial systems across scales.