Get to know Christopher Caridi–High-content Imaging Scientist

Our Employee Spotlight Series highlights the amazing individuals working behind the scenes at Sarafan ChEM-H.

Christopher Caridi is a High-Content Imaging Scientist in the High Throughput Screening (HTS) Group at the Nucleus. The Nucleus is a group of collaborative labs housed within Sarafan ChEM-H that brings together the technical expertise, training, and cutting-edge instruments needed to supercharge research at Stanford. The HTS lab helps Stanford researchers conduct systematic and comprehensive screens, allowing them to test how a biological system changes in response to chemical or genetic changes. They provide access to a 200,000+ compound library of drug like molecules, whole genome siRNA and cDNA, and they also have advanced instruments to accelerate and automate research like liquid handlers, a high content imager, and plate readers.

In the Q&A below, Christopher shares his career trajectory, what he finds most rewarding about his work, why Stanford researchers should collaborate with the HTS group, a valuable piece of advice, and more.

Can you share a bit about your background?

Christopher Caridi, High-content Imaging Scientist at the Nucleus

I started out as a yeast biologist doing molecular biology, and then I got really interested in microscopy and imaging. For my postdoc, I did a lot of chromosomal morphology and DNA damage repair using live cell microscopy. I studied how DNA is repaired using live cell microscopy. My focus was trying to understand how the chromosomes, structures that contain our DNA, move within the nucleus, especially in the context of when the chromosome gets damaged and the cell needs to repair it. Many diseases such as cancer can be linked to problems that occur with this repair process, especially as we age. And I loved it.

After my postdoc, I transitioned into industry and got into high content imaging, which is doing a bunch of microscopy at scale--tens of thousands of images, hundreds of plates. I then transitioned out of that and joined the High Throughput Screening Group in 2023.

Tell us about your role at the Nucleus.

I help people do assay development and get their experiments ready for high-throughput screening. Coming up with an assay that’s amenable to a high throughput screen can be challenging. There are many parameters that need to be figured out. The assay needs to be robust and reproducible. We need to scale it up, miniaturize it, and make it automation-friendly. So, I assist with that, help them design their experiments, and sometimes I actually run the screen. There’s a lot of cell culture and a lot of data analysis, data uploading, maintaining the lab, training users, and helping graduate students and postdocs do whatever science they need to do.

What do you wish people knew about the High-Throughput Screening Group?

Everyone should use the High Throughput Screening Group. Come do screens with us! Do a lot of things very quickly! I think it's an amazing resource, and more people should use it. Once you get out of doing things manually, you just never go back.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

I'd say the people and the variety. It’s really nice to be able to delve into a topic really specifically and become an expert on that. I’ve worked with so many cell lines and so many different areas of biology for basic research, including disease areas like cancer and Alzheimer’s, and it’s always changing, so there’s always a chance to learn something new. It’s very stimulating, like being back in college again, but I don’t have to get grades, and instead I get appreciated. You also get to form long-term, established relationships. It’s really very rewarding.

What is a memorable moment that you’d like to share?

The first time I saw the compound libraries. Once you grasp what 200,000 plus compounds actually represent in terms of space, you get overwhelmed and amazed at the same time. My first screen was to screen our whole small molecule compound library, which I think is around 700 plates. I wanted to save all the plates. We don’t have the room to save them all, but it would have been cool to take a picture just to show the scale at which we do our experiments. I think that was pretty cool.

What’s your favorite spot on campus?

The Arizona Cactus Garden has some trails you can walk on and benches where you can just sit. It's very relaxing and nice. I definitely like to go there.