Dr Wing Chung Tsoi is a Senior Lecturer from Materials Research Centre at the College of Engineering, Swansea University. He obtained his Higher Diploma in Applied Physics and BSc in Physics from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and The University of Hull, respectively. He then obtained his PhD in Physics at The University of Hull in 2006. After that, he took a postdoctoral position at The University of Sheffield. From 2009, he obtained a EPSRC-NPL postdoctoral partnership with Imperial College and National Physical Laboratory. From 2014, he was awarded Knowledge Transfer Secondment with Imperial College and NPL. During 2014-2019, he was a senior research officer at Swansea University. In 2019, he was a lecturer there and he was subsequently promoted to his current position in 2020. His research interests are mainly focus on solution-process photovoltaic/solar cells, including organic solar cells, perovskite solar cells...He is particularly interested in understanding the structure-property-performance relationship of the photovoltaic/solar cells, in order to understand the fundamentals and to improve the performance, particularly the stability of the photovoltaic/solar cells. His expertise is on developing/applying advanced (nano-) characterization methods to probe the structures/morphology of the photovoltaic thin films, and correlate it to the properties and performances. His particularly expertise is on advanced Raman system-based spectroscopy/mapping and functional atomic force microscopy as well as photovoltaic cells for indoor, power generation window and aerospace applications. Dr Tsoi have published 69 papers and involved in 60 oral presentations in international/national conferences including a number of invited talks.

Dr Wing Chung Tsoi is the winner of the 2021 RMS Medal for Innovation in Applied Microscopy for Engineering and Physical Sciences, this will be presented at mmc2021.

Andreas Bund is currently the head of the electrochemistry and electroplating group at Technische Universitaet Ilmenau. He studied chemistry at the University of Saarland (Saarbruecken, Germany) and obtained his PhD there in 1999 under the supervision of Guenter Schwitzgebel. Afterwards he joined the group of Waldfried Plieth at Technische Universitaet Dresden as a PostDoc and worked on the fundamentals and applications of electrochemical deposition processes. With a Heisenberg fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG) he could join the group of Henry S. White at the University of Utah in 2006 and 2007. There he worked on the electrochemistry of nanopores. From 2009 - 2010 he had a guest professorship at TU Muenchen at the Chair of Interfaces and Energy Conversion, which was headed by Ulrich Stimming at that time. In 2010 he was appointed full professor at TU Ilmenau. For the first five years this was an endowed professorship financially supported by the German association of electroplaters (ZVO). In 2019 he had a guest professorship at Keio University (Yokohama) and worked with Yasushi Katayama on electrochemical processes in ionic liquids. His research interest comprise fundamental and applied electrochemistry, such as electrodeposition and electrochemical storage and conversion of energy.

Since 2017 I am a permanent CNRS researcher in the group Nanostructures at the Nanosecond (NS2) at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides (LPS) in Orsay where I have set up a low temperature scanning probe facility with shot-noise capabilities. With this facility we aim to get a deeper understanding of dynamics and correlations at the atomic scale.   Before joining the LPS as a Marie Curie fellow in 2015, I have worked as a postdoc with Seamus Davis at Cornell University (2012-2015) uncovering the gap structure of the heavy Fermion superconductor CeCoIn5, and studying the pairing interaction and vortex pinning of iron based superconductors.  My PhD with Mark Golden and Jeroen Goedkoop at the University of Amsterdam (2007-2011) focussed on bilayer colossal magnetoresistant manganites and iron based superconductors using scanning tunnelling microscopy and angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy.  My name currently appears on 21 publications which have been cited in total >700 times (H-index = 14), and I have had the pleasure to speak about my work at 31 conferences and seminars (20 invited).

Scanning tunneling microscopy at 100 mK. Determination of the superconducting gap and electronic density of states in more than twenty different compounds.  Development and construction of new experiments, such as microscopy in three-axis magnets. Development of the synthesis of new quantum materials at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. PhD (1997) on thermal conductivity measurements at very low temperatures (15 mK) in the heavy fermion superconductor UPt3, establishing the quasiparticle excitation spectrum of nodal superconductors. Marie Curie fellow (1998-2000), Ramón y Cajal fellow (2001-2006), Profesor Titular (2006-2019), having passed through the state habilitation contest and Full Prof since 2019. Teacher of advanced laboratory, solid state and statistical physics. Fellow APS 2017. Manager (president of the physics panel) of the Spanish Science State Agency (2015-2018). Director of the Nicolás Cabrera Institute (2011-2020, www.uam.es/inc), coordinator for materials sience at www.uam.es/ifimac, coordination work at segainvex (www.uam.es/segainvex) and member of panels and commissions such as C5 IUPAP. 110 articles, h-index of 26, more than 50 invited contributions to international meetings, including major keynote talks, 2 patents, 7 co-directed PhD thesis, participation in numerous PhD committees. Action Chair of COST project (nanocohybri.eu), PI of 12 projects and co-PI in 2 Marie Curie projects. Co-organizer of 7 international meetings.

Laura Fumagalli is Reader in Condensed Matter Physics at the Department of Physics & Astronomy of the University of Manchester (UK) and staff researcher of the National Graphene Institute. She graduated in Electronic Engineering in 2002 (Polytechnic University of Milan - Italy and École Superior d’Electricité - France). She received her PhD in Information Technology in 2006 with a doctoral thesis on low-noise widebandwidth amplifiers at the Department of Electronics of Polytechnic University of Milan. She worked as post-doctoral researcher (2006-2010) and then lecturer (2010-2014) at the Department of Electronics of the University of Barcelona (Spain), where she pioneered the development of a novel nanoscopic technique - Scanning Dielectric Microscopy - that allows measuring the dielectric properties of matter on the nanoscale using a scanning probe. She joined the Condensed Matter Physics group of the University of Manchester (UK) in 2015. She was awarded the prestigious Ramon y Cajal fellowship by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science in 2014 and the ERC-Consolidator grant award ‘Liquid2DM’ by the European Research Council in 2018. Her research focuses on the study of electric and dielectric properties of bio and non-bio materials on the nano- and atomic scale, with particular interest in nanoconfined water and the solidliquid interface, biomembranes and biomolecules (DNA, proteins), van der Waals crystals and their heterostructures.

Dr Laura Fumagalli is the winner of the 2021 RMS Medal for Atomic Force Microscopy and Scanning Probe Microscopy,  this will be presented at mmc2021.

Professor Frank Koppens obtained his PhD in experimental physics at Delft University, at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, The Netherlands.  After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, Since August 2010, Koppens is group leader at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO).  The quantum nano-optoelectronics group of Professor Koppens focuses on both science and technology of novel two-dimensional materials and quantum materials.

Professor Koppens is vice-chairman of the executive board of the graphene flagship program, a 1000 MillionEuro project for 10 years. He is also the leader of the optoelectronics workpackage within the flagship.  Professor Koppens holds a GSMA Chair with activities related to the Mobile World Congress. 

Koppens has received five ERC awards: the ERC starting grant, the ERC consolidator grant, and three ERC proof-of-concept grants. Other awards include the Christiaan Hugyensprijs 2012, the national award for research in Spain, the IUPAP young scientist prize in optics, and the ACS photonics investigator award. In total, Koppens has published more than 80 refereed papers (H-index above 50), with more than 35 in Science and Nature family journals. Total number of citations exceeds 20.000 (google scholar).  Weblinks: Graphene.icfo.eu, Koppensgroup.icfo.eu

Dr Laia Pasquina-Lemonche is a Research Associate in Professor Jamie Hobbs’ group at University of Sheffield. She graduated from Physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in 2015. Then, she received a Master in Nanobiotechnology and Nanoscience  at UAB in 2016. Then, she started her PhD in Biophysics at the University of Sheffield focused on deciphering the molecular architecture of gram-positive bacterial cell wall using AFM (L.Pasquina-Lemonche, J.Burns, et al, 2020, Nature). After her PhD, she keeps working in the Hobbs group focusing on understanding how the bacterial cell wall structure changes upon antibiotic treatments and other environments. Recently, she is developing new approaches to push the limits of resolution of biological material with AFM with the aim to study the peptidoglycan architecture of the cell wall more in detail.

Pedro José de Pablo Gómez, was born in Madrid on March 1972. He finished the studies of Physics (Condensed Mattter) at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid on September 1995. He obtained the PhD entitled “Transport properties of mesoscopic systems studied with Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)” on December 2000, where he studied the electronic transport of molecular wires, such as carbon nanotubes and DNA. He gained the Extraordinary Ph. D. Prize of UAM. In 2001 he moved to The Netherlands to carry on postdoctoral research on single-molecule biophysics and performed studies of molecular motors (kinesin) and bacteriophage phi29 with AFM. In September 2003 Dr. De Pablo started his own research line on investigating the trinomial structure-function-properties of viruses with AFM. Viruses studied include minute virus of mice, bacteriophages phi29, T7, lambda, P22, human adenovirus, rotavirus, etc. He specialized in measuring the physical properties of viruses, such as stiffness, pressure, fatigue, electrostatics, etc. He aims to establish fruitful relationships between these properties and the function of viruses.

Markus Sauer studied Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg where he received his Diploma in 1991 and finished his PhD 1995 in Physical Chemistry. 1998 he has been awarded the BioFuture Prize for Detection, Analysis and Handling of Single Molecules, which allowed him to establish his own group for single-molecule fluorescence detection and single-molecule DNA sequencing. Since 2009 he is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biotechnology and Biophysics at the Julius Maximilian University Würzburg. His research interests are single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and imaging with a particular focus on super-resolution fluorescence imaging by direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM) and its applications in structural biology, immunology, host-pathogen interactions, and cancer immunotherapies. A couple of years ago he started to combine refined super-resolution and expansion microscopy methods to push the limits and pave the way for true molecular resolution. He has published more than 280 journal papers and coordinates several super-resolution microscopy based projects.

Katrin studied Physics at Würzburg University, Germany, and at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, U.S.A., before joining Stefan W. Hell’s research team at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen in 2002 for her PhD on STED microscopy. In this time she pioneered the first biological relevant applications of super-resolution microscopy and the use of fluorescent proteins for STED microscopy of living cells. During her postdoc she developed STED microscopy for imaging tissue, i.e. living organotypic brain slices and demonstrated the strength of these technologies by in vivo imaging of the tiny protrusions (dendritic spines) on nerve cell dendrites inside a living mouse brain with unprecedented detail. Since 2014 she is heading her own junior research group at the Göttingen CNMPB located the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine. Her objective is to further the strength of STED microscopy for in vivo applications. In 2015 she was awarded the Lennart Nilsson Award “Recognizing Extraordinary Image Makers in Science” from Karolinska Institutet.

Caren Norden is a cell and developmental biologist who is the head of the Cell Biology of Tissue Morphogenesis Research Group at the IGC in Oeiras Portugal. Her research aims to understand ‘how cells form tissues’ using the vertebrate retina as a model system and investigating phenomena across scales and using cross-disciplinary approaches.

She studied in Hannover, Germany and did her masters at the the Mount Sinai school of Medicine in New York City studying the emergence of polarity of neurons in culture. In 2002 she started studying polarity and cytokinesis in the budding yeast saccharomyces cerevisiae.  she used her knowledge in cell biology and moved to understand neuroepithelial development in zebrafish at the University of Cambridge, UK during her postdoc.  In 2010, she started her own group at the MPI-CBG in Dresden, where she expanded her research portfolio and made important discoveries in different contexts of retinal development.

Caren Norden is the deputy director of science of the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência since October 2019. In 2002 she started her PhD At the ETH Zurich in Switzerland.  Her works has previously been recognized by an HFSP Career Development Award and the José A. Campos-Ortega Young Scientist Award of the German Society for Developmental Biology. In addition, she became a member of the EMBO Young Investigator Network in 2015 and full EMBO member since 2020.

I studied physics at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany) with diploma at the institute of optics in 1994.  During my PhD in physics in Heidelberg I investigated different kinds of light scattering at the Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics, as well as evanescent wave microscopy at the Max-Planck-Institute for medical research in Heidelberg – both with applications in cell biology.  After my PhD in 1998, I continued my research as a Post-Doc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. I intensified my studies on microscopy, light scattering and optical forces.  In 2001, I became project leader at EMBL, where I concentrated on the development of photonic force microscopy and on applications in biophysics and soft matter physics.  In 2005, I was awarded with the habilitation in physics at the university of Heidelberg.  Since January 2006 I am full professor for Bio- and Nano-Photonics at IMTEK, Faculty of engineering and since 2007 also a member of the physics faculty, University of Freiburg.  We want to understand the dynamics of living system on short timescales. Therefore, we develop novel techniques for laser optical microscopy and optical force based applications. We investigate the biophysics of living cells and of bio-mimetic systems based on their nano-mechanics and thermal fluctuations.  Since 1999 I have been fascinated by microscopy with more than one optical axis. Being in Freiburg, I introduced Bessel beams to the field of light-sheet microscopy in 2009 and 2010, the concept of line-confocal detection in 2012, and a powerful method to suppress scattered light image contributions in 2016.

Kristina D. Micheva is Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University, California, USA. She obtained her Ph.D. with Dr. Clermont Beaulieu at Université de Montréal in Canada and later trained as postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Peter S. McPherson at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and Dr. Stephen J Smith at Stanford University. She is coinventor of array tomography, a high-resolution proteomic imaging method that allows the imaging of dozens of different antibodies at individual subcellular structures within large volumes of tissue. Dr. Micheva is interested in synapse organization, function and plasticity, and uses correlative array tomography to explore the diversity of synapses, axons and their myelin in experimental animals and human patients.

Benjamin Engel received his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. from UC San Francisco. He performed his postdoctoral studies in the lab of Wolfgang Baumeister at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. He currently leads a group at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus in Munich, Germany, where he studies the molecular architecture of organelles.
Cells accomplish the biochemical reactions of life by concentrating their proteins into a variety of subcellular compartments called organelles. Our group explores the relationship between the form of the organelle and the function of its resident macromolecules. How does organelle architecture direct molecular function, and reciprocally, how do macromolecules sculpt and shape organelles? To investigate these questions, we use focused ion beam (FIB) milling of frozen cells followed by cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) to image macromolecules within their native cellular environment. Through a combination of nanometer-precision localization and high-resolution structural analysis, we aim to chart the molecular landscapes of organelles. Learn more about us here:  https://www.cellarchlab.com/

Philipp Kukura is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, leading an interdisciplinary research group that focusses on the development and application of new optical methodologies to study biomolecular structure, dynamics and interactions. A particular focus has been mass photometry, the detection, characterisation and quantification of biomolecular structure and interactions by mass measurement at the single molecule level in solution. Recent awards include those by the RSC (Harrison-Meldola 2011 and Marlow 2015), the European Biophysical Society Association (Young Investigator Medal 2017), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2018), the Klung-Wilhemy Award (2018) and a UK Blavatnik Award Laureate (2019).

Professor Philipp Kukura is the winner of the 2021 RMS Medal for Light Microscopy, this will be presented at mmc2021.

Dr. Vladana Vukojević is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research focuses on understanding how biomolecules are integrated via chemical reactions and transport processes into self-regulated dynamical networks of interactions through which life-sustaining biological functions emerge at longer spatio-temporal scales. To this aim, she is using analytical and integrative approaches. Her experimental work focuses on further advancement of existing and the development of new fluorescence microscopy and correlation spectroscopy based methodologies, such as the recently developed quantitative time-resolved scanning-free confocal fluorescence microscopy via massively parallel Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy. She is using these advanced analytical methods to map the dynamic reaction-diffusion landscape in live cells and to quantitatively characterize how it is altered by selected substances, e.g. prospective drug candidates or disease causing agents. Moreover, she is using approaches from dynamical systems theory to describe and predict dynamic changes in complex biochemical systems and interpret their consequences.  Dr. Vukojević is Visiting Professor at the University of Belgrade, Serbia; Visiting Lecturer at the Hokkaido Summer Institute (HSI), Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan; and co-founder of AmyloiDia, Sweden AB. She is co-author of more than 90 research articles in renowned peer-reviewed scientific journals. 

Yanlan Mao is a Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London. After receiving her BA in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, she completed her PhD with Matthew Freeman at the MRC LMB in Cambridge on Drosophila cell signaling and epithelial patterning. During her postdoc with Nic Tapon at the CRUK London Research Institute (now Francis Crick Institute), she became interested in tissue mechanics and computational modeling approaches, and studied the role of mechanical forces in orienting cell divisions and controlling tissue shape. In 2014, when Yanlan started her independent research group, she has continued to investigate the role of mechanical forces in tissue development, homeostasis and repair. 

She now holds a MRC Career Development Award Fellowship, a Lister Institute Prize and an L’Oreal UNESCO Women in Science Fellowship. She was selected to join the EMBO Young Investigator Programme in 2018, was recently awarded the Early Career Prize in Mechanobiology by the Biophysical Society, and the BSCB Women in Cell Biology Early Career Medal.

Dr Yanlan Mao is the winner of the 2021 RMS Medal for Life Sciences, this will be presented at mmc2021.

Colinda Scheele is a junior group leader at VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology as of June 2020. Colinda received a Master in Biomedical Sciences from Utrecht University. She performed her PhD research (cum laude) in the lab of Prof. Jacco van Rheenen (at the Hubrecht Institute (Utrecht) and the Netherlands Cancer Institute (Amsterdam)). During this time, she pioneered unbiased lineage tracing approaches, 3D whole organ imaging techniques and intravital microscopy strategies to study mammary stem cell dynamics. She identified the pubertal mammary stem cells and how they drive mammary gland branching morphogenesis (Scheele*, Hannezo* et al., 2017, Nature; Hannezo*, Scheele* et al., 2017, Cell; Corominas-Murtra*, Scheele* et al., 2020, PNAS). Moreover, she studied how these mammary stem cells contribute to tumor initiation and progression. For this research proposal, Colinda was awarded a prestigious Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (BIF) PhD fellowship.
 
The Scheele laboratory focuses on morphogenesis, homeostasis, and tumorigenesis of epithelial organs ranging from a cellular level to the organ scale. More specifically, the Scheele lab studies how healthy tissue architecture and environment prevent or promote the different steps of tumorigenesis. To study these highly dynamic processes, the Scheele lab utilizes and develops state-of-the-art imaging approaches, including 3D whole organ imaging and 4D intravital microscopy using imaging windows. These imaging tools are complemented with (spatial) omics approaches, as well as quantitative modelling to further elucidate the mechanisms of tissue transformation.

Max is a cell biologist originally from Mendoza, Argentina. In 2005, he obtained a PhD in cell biology from the University of San Luis, Argentina. During his PhD work, he discovered a novel innate immune pathway, later named “Xenophagy”. In 2006, he moved to EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany as a postdoc in Gareth Griffiths Laboratory, first as a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and then as an EMBO fellow. His work in Heidelberg focused on the cell biology and imaging of macrophages; it was also in Heidelberg that he felt in love with Electron Microscopy.
In 2009, he started his independent research group at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany as head of the Junior Research Group 'Phagosome Biology'. In 2012, he was recruited as a Programme Leader Track at the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research, which became part of the Francis Crick Institute in 2015. Since 2018, he is a Senior Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute.
As a cell biologist trained in microbiology, how intracellular pathogens evolved strategies to survive within host cells has always fascinated me and clearly shaped my scientific career. My long-standing interest is the cellular mechanisms that regulate the interactions between Mycobacterium tuberculosis and host cells. I aim to better understand the host cell factors that contribute to M. tuberculosis control as well as the M. tuberculosis factors that this pathogen uses to highjack host cells. To this end, my lab is developing a variety of cutting-edge imaging technologies in high containment combined with various model systems and approaches at the single cell level.

Torsten did his PhD at the University of Darmstadt in Germany, in microbial ecology using metagenomic approaches to characterise the impact of archaea mostly in soil habitats. He then switched gears and fell in love with parasites. During his postdoc first at the MBL in Woods Hole, USA and then at UGA in Athens, GA USA, he worked on RNA-editing in the human and animal parasite Trypanosoma brucei. After moving to the University of Bern in Switzerland he focused on cell biological aspects of mitochondrial organelle biology in trypanosomes using a variety of techniques most importantly super resolution microscopy. His lab continues to apply high end microscopy techniques to visualise parasite cell biology including ultrastructure expansion microscopy and cryo-electron microscopy.

Dr. Maguire is a Senior Cytometry Specialist in the department of Flow and Imaging Cytometry at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY. She obtained her PhD from Ulster University in Northern Ireland, UK, studying the activity of nuclear receptor transcription factor pathways in cancer. Her current research interests are focused on developing clinical applications of imaging flow cytometry (IFC), with special attention to transcription factor pathways. The goal of this research is to provide clinicians and researchers with useful information in the functional activity of transcription factor pathways in immunophenotypically defined populations. More recently her research has extended to cellular communication via exosome signaling using IFC. She has published numerous original method manuscripts in these areas and currently has national and international collaborations with both hospital-based research groups and pharmaceutical companies studying signaling pathways in several diseases. Dr. Maguire is an ISAC Marylou Ingram Scholar for the 2018-2022 term.

Assistant Professor Yoav Shechtman leads the Nano-Bio-Optics lab at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. Yoav Finished all degrees at the Technion: BSc in Physics and Electrical Engineering (2007), Phd (2013), and then spent three years as a postdoc at Stanford University (2016), developing super-resolution microscopy methods with W.E. Moerner.

His research interests lie mainly in developing and applying optical and signal processing methods for nanoscale imaging challenges.  Specifically, Yoav focuses on aspects of single/multiple particle localization and tracking under challenging conditions, e.g. three-dimensional, multicolor, and high throughput imaging, using advanced optical, signal processing and machine learning techniques. The techniques developed in the lab are applied to challenges ranging from basic science, i.e. observing chromatin dynamics in 3D, to biomedical applications, i.e. developing ultra-sensitive assays for bacterial growth.

Among Yoav's recent awards and recognitions: 2016 Technion Career Advancement Chair, 2017 Zuckerman Faculty Scholar, 2018 Early Career Award of the International Association for Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE), 2018 European Research Council starting grant, 2019 Uzi and Michal Halevy Award for Innovative Applied Engineering, 2020 International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics (IUPAB) Young Investigator Prize and Medal.

Lab wesbite: http://nanobiooptics.net.technion.ac.il/

Nidhi is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Kaye lab, Hull York Medical School, University of York. Trained in developmental genetics (PhD),  Nidhi completed her PhD (2017) from Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER), India looking for stem cells in Drosophila as a model for aorta-gonad-mesonephros–derived hematopoietic stem cells . Currently, Nidhi is investigating immunopathology of human CL with particular emphasis on host -immune interactions and looking for novel host directed therapies that might alleviate patient suffering.  

Jan studied Biochemistry at University of Warwick, before gaining a PhD at University of Nottingham using Molecular Histology to investigate the expression and turnover of extracellular matrix proteins.
He has been working in Pharma molecular histology groups since 2007, leading tissue based assay development and deployment on drug discovery programmes in respiratory, oncology and immunology therapy areas. This has included all stages of the drug discovery pipeline, from broad target identification campaigns, through drug efficacy and tox studies, and regulated clinical trial assay delivery. This has included in depth experience with brightfield and fluorescence IHC and ISH, image analysis, and antibody and assay validation.
More recently Jan has built a team dedicated to the application of spatial multiplexing and multi-omics, combining diverse skill sets from imaging, proteomics, sequencing and data analytics, to maximise the impact of tissue slide-based multiplexing technologies in applications such as immuno-phenotyping tissues, and characterising molecular pathways driving mechanism and mode of action at the cellular level in tissue context.

Roland is a Professor at the Department of Physics at the University of York concentrating on Nano- and Biomaterials using electron microscopy as well as various spectroscopy tools including Raman microscopy and X-ray techniques. He obtained his PhD from the University of Hamburg/Germany and the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Science and Technology in Braunschweig/Germany. Roland has since built a large expertise in Materials Physics and Materials Science covering diamond thin films, metal/semiconductor nanostructures, nitride based light-emitting devices, metal nanoparticles for biomedical applications and biominerals using focused ion beam as a key method for sample preparation and analysis. Besides his interest in multi-lengthscale material characterization in 3D he is particularly focussing on in situ techniques to study mineralisation processes in liquid environments.

Philip Withers is the first Regius Professor of Materials and Chief Scientist of the Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials.  He was a lecturer in Cambridge from his PhD until 1998 before taking up a Chair in Manchester.  He employs advanced imaging and characterisation techniques to follow the behaviour of engineering and natural materials, often in 3D and in operando.  A fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. He pioneered the use of neutron and synchrotron X-rays for probing the behaviour and degradation of engineering materials. In 2008 he set up the Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility, one of the most extensive suites of X-ray Imaging facilities in the world with a special focus on in situ time lapse 3D X-ray imaging. In 2014, the Facility was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize.  In 2020 these facilities became a founding part of the National Research Facility in Lab. CT opening up the capability to the wider academic and industrial community. He is also active in the area of 3D electron microscopy imaging and characterisation through dual beam (PFIB-SEM) and tribeam (laser-PFIB-SEM) serial sectioning.  Taken together the X-ray and electron microscopy techniques cover a very wide range of length scales and contrast mechanisms and these are being incorporated within a correlative framework to provide multifaceted, multiscale information.

Julia Parker is an X-ray microscopist at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility. Julia is responsible for the operation of the hard X-ray nanoprobe beamline, supporting nanoscale spectroscopy, diffraction and imaging experiments across the life and physical sciences. Julia joined Diamond in 2007 after completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Julia’s current research interests lie in the area of biomineralisation, using synchrotron techniques to unveil details of the structure of calcium carbonates formed by organisms such as shells and studying the crystallisation and formation pathways of calcium carbonates.

Alexandra Pacureanu is a scientist at the European Synchrotron developing X-ray microscopy with focus on bioimaging. She has a background in electrical engineering and signal processing, and she received her PhD from INSA Lyon, France in 2012. Her thesis on nanoscale X-ray tomography of the bone cell network received the French Biomedical Engineering Society innovation award. Between 2012 and 2014 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Uppsala University and the Science for Life Laboratory in Sweden, where she developed image analysis methods for in-situ gene sequencing and high throughput microscopy. For the following five years she returned to ESRF to work on development of X-ray cryogenic nano-tomography for 3D imaging of biological tissues and cells. In 2019 she was a visiting scientist in the Neurobiology department at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and a senior research fellow at the University College London and the Francis Crick Institute in the Sensory Circuits and Neurotechnology group. Since the beginning of 2020 she is leading the X-ray Neuroimaging at Nanoscale research unit at ESRF.

Dr Alexandra Pacureanu is the winner of the 2021 Alan Agar Award for Electron Microscopy Medal, sponsored by Agar Scientific. This will be presented at mmc2021.

Kwasi Kwakwa is an Imaging Scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-EBI working jointly between the Marioni group at the EBI and the Bayraktar group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. He obtained his PhD from King’s College London in 2013 and has been primarily involved in microscope design, single molecule imaging and image analysis ever since. Currently he is part of a group interested in building imaging and image analysis tools for spatial transcriptomics.

Deborah Schmidt recently joined the Image Data Analysis group led by Kyle Harrington at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. Since 2017 she integrated Deep Learning solutions into Fiji and became a core contributor to the SciJava / ImageJ2 ecosystem as a member of the Jug Lab at the Center for Systems Biology / Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. Occasionally she creates generative artwork and interactive installations and is fascinated by frugal science, open source communities, and decentralized systems.

Ben Giepmans is intrigued by how molecules act together to control cell fate in health and disease. He is a cell biologist and molecular biochemist/ microscopist and always have been triggered by using newly developed techniques to overcome current limitations in research, especially when these techniques allow to get unbiased, unexpected answers to research questions. His PhD research at The Netherlands Cancer Institute and related work in The Scripps Research Institute have led to a better molecular understanding of regulation of gap junctions. Similarly, during his post-doc at the National Center of Microscopy and Imaging Research (University of California, San Diego), we optimized and implemented several new advanced imaging techniques and probes to study protein dynamics in live cells and protein localization at high resolution. Giepmans was awarded the Robert Fuelgen prize by the Society for Histochemistry for this work. Currently, my team develops and/or implements new imaging techniques and probes for microscopy, including large-scale EM (‘nanotomy’) and ‘ColorEM’, where elemental analysis is implemented in EM for life sciences.  Next to his research, Giepmans took the challenge to build an advanced microscopy imaging infrastructure at the UMCG. The center is now equipped with state-of-the-art light microscopes and electron microscopes (www.umic.info). We continue to develop and/or implement multimodal microscopy in several research projects (www.nanotomy.org). In particular, we study the possible triggers that may interfere with normal function of Islets of Langerhans ultimately resulting in Type 1 diabetes.

Katie Moore is a Lecturer in Materials Characterisation in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester. She obtained her D.Phil from the University of Oxford in Materials Science in 2011 and then held an EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship working on NanoSIMS imaging of trace elements in crops before taking up a Research Fellow position at the University of Manchester in 2014. Katie has been working with the NanoSIMS since 2008 and now leads the NanoSIMS group at Manchester University.

Her research has been primarily to use the NanoSIMS to investigate trace element uptake in crops, such as arsenic uptake in rice and iron in wheat grain, but she has also used the NanoSIMS on a wide range of other materials. Recent work includes investigating oxidation and hydrogen pick up mechanisms in zirconium, steel and nickel alloys using isotopic tracers, such as deuterium, with the NanoSIMS.

Dr. Minbiao Ji received B.S. degree in Physics from the Peking University, Beijing, in 2005 He received his Ph.D degree in Physics at Stanford University, in 2011. His research was focused on using ultrafast laser spectroscopy. Afterwards, he joined the research group of Prof. Sunney Xie at Harvard University as a postdoctoral research fellow, working on coherent Raman scattering microscopy. Minbiao Ji is currently a Professor in the Department of Physics at Fudan University in Shanghai. His current research is focused on developing novel nonlinear optical spectroscopy and microscopy tools to study biomedical problems and material sciences.

Malgorzata Kujawinska PhD DSc., SPIE Fellow, Full Professor of applied optics at Warsaw University of Technology. Expert in full-field optical metrology,  development of novel photonics measurement systems, 3D label-free, quantitative imaging in biomedical engineering with special focus on digital holographic microscopy and optical diffraction tomography. Author of one monograph, several book chapters and more than 250 papers in international scientific journals. She had been the  SPIE President and vice-President of European Technology Platform Photonics21. The recipient of SPIE 2013 Chandra S. Vikram Award in Optical Metrology.

Perrine Paul-Gilloteaux is a CNRS research engineer in image data analysis and management, in Nantes. After electrical engineering studies at the national institute of applied science of Rennes, she received her PhD in 2006 from the University of Rennes, France, in biomedical engineering. After a post-doctoral position in Maynooth, Ireland, in systems biology, she was recruited by CNRS at the institut Curie in Paris in 2010 as bio image analyst. She moved to Nantes, France in 2015, where she is now heading the MicroPICell facility (light microscopy, histology and image analysis), part of the France Bio Imaging national infrastructure, and center of excellence Nikon. In addition to developing image analysis methods as services for the facility users, she is the PI for the development of methods for correlative microscopies, implemented in ec-clem software. Her main research interests are the development of methods for quantitative analysis of dynamics in cell biology and for the fusion and interpretation of multimodal and multiscale data. She is one of the founder and working group leader in the COST action network NEUBIAS, network of european bio image analyst, and vice-chair of the COST action COMULIS correlative multimodal imaging for life sciences.

Daniel Baum is head of the research group »Visual Data Analysis« and deputy head of the department »Visual and Data-Centric Computing« at the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), Germany. He studied computer science at the Humboldt-Universität and the University of Edinburgh. In 2007, he received his Dr. rer. nat. degree from the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on molecular shape analysis. His current research interests include visual data analysis, computer graphics, image analysis as well as shape modelling and analysis. Daniel has many years of experience in interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers from very different fields like biology, geoscience, material science and ancient studies. He therefore regularly works on data of different origin, size, and scale from a variety of image sources, including micro-computed tomography, electron tomography, but also histological data and 2-photon microscopy. As part of his research, for almost 20 years, Daniel has been an active developer of the Amira software, which was originally developed at ZIB and is now jointly developed with Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Leila Muresan works in fluorescence microscopy image analysis, with special focus on solutions for single molecule imaging and lightsheet microscopy. After completing a PhD in Engineering at Johannes Kepler University, Linz (Austria), she continued with post-doctoral stays at ENS (Paris) and CGM-CNRS (Gif-sur-Yvette). Currently, she is an EPSRC Research Software Engineer Fellow in Cambridge Advanced Imaging Centre. She is affiliated with the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience as well as Sainsbury Laboratory (University of Cambridge).

Martin Weigert is a computer scientist whose research focuses on computational optics and machine learning based image reconstruction and segmentation for microscopy. He did his PhD at the MPI-CBG in Dresden and recently joined EPFL, Switzerland as a group leader.

Irene Groot obtained her PhD degree at Leiden University investigating the dissociation of hydrogen on single crystals, both experimentally using supersonic molecular beams and theoretically performing density functional theory and quantum dynamics calculations. After a postdoc at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, where she studied CO oxidation using sanning tunneling microscopy, she went to the Leiden Institute of Physics with a personal Veni fellowship from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Here she investigated HCl oxidation using scanning tunneling microscopy under reaction conditions, and subsequently started her own group.

Currently, Irene Groot is associate professor (tenured) at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry where she is heading the operando catalysis research group. She investigates the structure-activity relationship of catalysts under industrial conditions using operando scanning probe microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray-based techniques. She focuses on industrial processes related to sustainable energy and materials production. Current topics in her group are hydrodesulfurization, Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, methanol steam reforming, automotive catalysis, chlorine production, and graphene growth on liquid copper. Additionally, she is developing equipment for high-pressure surface science and operando catalysis research.

Thomas Hansen studied physics at the University of Copenhagen where he received his M.Sc. in 2001 finishing with a project on the use of electron energy-loss spectroscopy for the study of carbon-based materials. He then pursued his PhD in chemistry as a joint project between the University of New Mexico, the Technical University of Denmark and the catalyst company Haldor Topsøe. During his PhD studies, he used environmental transmission electron microcopy to study the sintering of nickel-based steam reforming catalysts under different environments. After receiving his degree in 2006, he continued his research in catalysis at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin where he studied complex mixed metal oxides for selective oxidation processes. In 2008, he returned to the Technical University of Denmark, first in a post-doctoral position, and was in 2010 promoted to senior researcher. Thomas now focuses on the study of the dynamics and growth of nanostructures (nanoparticles and 2D materials) by environmental transmission electron microscopy and the application of automated analysis techniques such as convolutional neural networks. His primary interests are the fundamental properties of nanostructures and the use and development of in situ techniques.

After a PhD in physics in Rouen (2006) where we developed a new generation of pulsed-laser atom probe microscopes, I worked as a scientist at the ACMM at the University of Sydney from 2007-2009 and 2010-2012 (jointly with ANSTO), and in-between, I was a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Materials, University of Oxford where I worked on thermoelectric materials. In 2012, I was appointed Assist. Prof. at McMaster University in Canada, but quitted after 6 months. From Dec. 2012 - Dec. 2015, I interrupted my research career, and took on a position of Senior Publisher in the Materials Science group at Elsevier Ltd. in Oxford, looking after the Materials Engineering portfolio. During that time, I became an academic visitor at the Department of Materials, University of Oxford. On 1st January 2016, I became the Group Leader for Atom Probe Tomography at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung in Düsseldorf. Since October 2018, I also hold a part-time appointment as Reader at the Department of Materials, Imperial College London. I received the Leibniz Prize 2020 for my work on the development of the pulsed-laser atom probe tomography and help enable the spread of the technique over the past 15 years.

Professor Rachel Oliver is Director of the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride.  The focus of her research is understanding how the small scale structure of nitride materials effects the performance and properties of devices. She uses expertise in microscopy and materials growth to develop new nanoscale nitride structures which will provide new functionality to the devices of the future.  She is also passionate about communicating science to the general public and hence widening participation in science by under-represented groups, particularly women.

Sean first worked in electron microscopy and microanalysis in 2009 as an undergraduate student at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland (USA) and subsequently in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He completed his PhD in Materials Science in 2016 at the University of Cambridge, using electron energy loss spectroscopy to examine the optical properties of plasmonic metal nanoparticles. He worked as a post-doc in Cambridge and then from 2017 as the Henslow Research Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, investigating domain microstructures of metal-organic framework crystals and glasses. In 2019, Sean was appointed as a University Academic Fellow in the Bragg Centre for Materials Research at the University of Leeds, jointly in the Schools of Chemical and Process Engineering and Chemistry. Sean specialises in tomography, spectroscopy, and scanning electron diffraction with experiments at SuperSTEM, the electron Physical Sciences Imaging Centre (ePSIC) at the Diamond Light Source, and the Leeds Electron Microscopy and Spectroscopy (LEMAS) Centre focusing on nanoscale optical properties and crystallography of molecular materials. 

Jim Naismith is the first Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, the theme lead for Structural Biology at the Institute and Professor at University of Oxford.

Jim grew up in Hamilton, in the west of Scotland attending local state schools. He graduated from Edinburgh in 1989 with a BSc in Chemistry and with PhD from Manchester.  He has been a Carnegie Scholar, a NATO fellow and a BBSRC fellow. His lab have won numerous awards including most recently the Tilden Medal.  He has spun out GyreOx from his academic lab, been the expert witness in the most consequential ($10bn) biosimiliar patent case in the USA and has been elected to the Council of the Royal Society.  Until 2017 he was the Bishop Wardlaw Professor Chemical Biology at St Andrews.  He leads the Franklin team who reported the breakthrough in July in using Llama nanobodies to neutralise the COVID19 virus. The team are focussed on getting these agents into the clinic.

Professor Mary Ryan FREng, FIMMM, FICorr is currently Professor of Materials Science and Nanotechnology, and Vice-Dean for Research in the Faculty of Engineering at Imperial College London.  She joined Imperial from Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US where she worked in the Materials-Environment Interactions Group. She graduated from Manchester University with a Joint Honours degree in Mathematics and Physics and was then awarded a PhD in Materials Science, carrying out early work with in situ electrochemical STM to study passivation phenomena in binary alloy systems. She leads a large interdisciplinary group focused on understanding nanoscale materials, and nanoscale interfaces in and between materials and their environments. She has a particular interest in the development of operando approaches and nanoscale methods in synchrotron science.