Pollen SEM Images

As part of Festival of the Mind 2026, I took scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of pollen from around Sheffield. Some of these images were displayed during the Festival.

Here I am making more of the images available for use in outreach and education, subject to the following terms:

The images are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) licence. As such, commercial use of the files and any derivatives is not permitted. 'Dr Lisa Smith, University of Sheffield' must be acknowledged as the creator of the images.
If you wish to use the images in research (or to have access to the original files), please email me at my Univeristy of Sheffield address to discuss. I'd love to hear if you use the images for outreach or education.

How were these images made?

The pollen was mounted directly on carbon tabs on metal stubs and imaged using a Hitachi TM3030 Benchtop Scanning Electron Microscope. The raw images were processed in Adobe Photoshop to isolate a single pollen grain or group of pollen grains and remove the background to produce the images below. For Festival of the Mind, some of the images were false coloured in Adobe Photoshop.