I'm a neuroscientist / former brain bank manager who's developing an app to help researchers spend less time glued to microscopes in the lab. Ask me anything!


Hello reddit,I'm Dr Matthew Williams, a neuroscientist in the UK who has recently been developing Segmentum Imaging, an attempt to move the slow and cumbersome methods of cell measurement into a more streamlined and neat system that you can use on a mobile device (meaning you can do it while lying in bed, watching TV or in the bar, rather than in a room with no windows and awful fluorescent lighting). We're hoping to launch our first version soon and are looking for people to try it and let us know what they think, or just people who've been stuck in lonely microscope rooms for untold hours to say what sort of features they'd like on such a system.What's my background, though?So after being a regular old neuroscientist for a few years I went up to full-on creepy neuroscientist when I inherited a huge human brain bank - a brief overview of this was described in a Cracked article a few years ago. More recently I got some very minor proxy fame in this parish by finding a tropical-spider egg sack on a banana and taking it to the local arachnid lab (as documented in a series of posts by /u/lagoon83, who's helping me stay on top of the AMA this evening: 1 2 3 4). More recently, as well as developing some digital biotech as a startup, I'm now working on creating another brain bank - but this time, for much of the animal kingdom as part of an international collaboration.As suggested by the mods, I've posted this ahead of time so people can start adding comments - I'll be on here from 6pm GMT (1pm EST) and will stick around for a few hours to answer any questions you have about our app, digital pathology, my background, neuroscience in general, and whether I've summoned the strength of will to eat a banana recently.Ask me anything! via /r/technology http://bit.ly/2SUb1X1