I performed my PhD between 2006-2009 at the University of Genoa (Italy) in the group of Prof. A. Diaspro working on the use of Photo-switchable Fluorescent Proteins for cellular trafficking.  Between 2009-2014 I worked as a Postdoc Researcher in the group of the Nobel Laureate Prof. S.W. Hell at the MPI-BS in Göttingen (Germany). During this time I actively developed several nanoscopes based on (1) single molecule switching for multicolour imaging (2) RESOLFT nanoscopy. Within an interdisciplinary team of biologists and physicists we succeeded to apply the RESOLFT concept in living cells and even tissues for the first time.  Since 2015 I’m Professor at KTH, SciLifeLab in Stockholm (Sweden). The goal of my group is to develop the next generation nanoscopy approaches to address contemporary challenges in biophysics and molecular biology. We recently developed MoNaLISA, a microscope able to record large images with 50-70 nm spatial resolution in less than a second. A special effort will be dedicated to investigate the nanoscale organization and function of organelles in neuronal cells with our new technology.

Michael Lherbette discovered the possibilities of atomic force microscopy for the study of biological systems during his Master thesis at Oxford University. Afterward, he moved to Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh to obtain a PhD in biophysics. During this time he further developed advanced force spectroscopy techniques to measure and to model the visco-elastic response of cell nuclei and 3D clathrin protein lattices. Currently, Michael works at SmarAct GmbH in Germany where he is developing advanced metrology instruments that are used by manufacturers of micro-mechanical devices to measure vibrations of microscopic devices

Ilke Arslan is the Group Leader for Electron and X-ray Microscopy at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory. After receiving her Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Davis, she went to the University of Cambridge as a National Science Foundation and Royal Society Postdoctoral Fellow. She then returned to the U.S. as a Truman Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories. Following this, Arslan became a faculty member in the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Department at the University of California, Davis, before moving to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a senior scientist while maintaining an adjunct professor position at University of California, Davis. Arslan has been honored with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the Kavli Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include understanding the atomic, electronic and 3D structure of a range of nanomaterials for energy, including materials for quantum information sciences and materials for catalysis. She is also interested in technique development in electron and x-ray microscopies, including time-resolved microscopy and in situ liquid/gas/heating/cooling/biasing environments in the microscope.

Patricia Abellan is a staff research scientist at SuperSTEM Laboratory (Daresbury, UK) and a SuperSTEM research fellow at the University of Leeds (since 2015). She received her BSc in Physics from the Aalborg University (Denmark) and her Ph.D. in Materials Sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC), Spain, in 2011. She has held postdoctoral positions at the University of California – Davis and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA. Her research focuses on the use of the effect of the electron beam in solid and liquid media to investigate nanomaterials (excited electronic states of molecules, molecule-metal interactions or the growth and degradation dynamics of nanostructures by ionizing species). In 2013 she received the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award from the Microscopy Society of Spain and her work has led to research highlights from PNNL's Physical Science Division, DOE’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) and Nature News. Most recently, she has co-organized the radiation beam-damage pre-meeting congress at M&M2017 and has served as managing guest editor of the special issue in liquid-phase EM in Micron (2019). She has published over 40 journal articles and book chapters, is the co-inventor in a patent application and has given 16 invited presentations at international conferences and academic institutions.

Full Professor of Physics at the University of Perugia since 2010. PI of the Research Group on Soft Matter and Glasses (http://ghost.fisica.unipg.it). He has been working on micro- and nano-spectroscopic-imaging of biological systems, collective and single particle dynamics of pure water and of hydration water in systems of biological interest, collective dynamics of amorphous solids, structural arrest in glass transition, gelation and polymerization processes. He set up the laboratories of Brillouin Spectroscopy, simultaneous micro-Brillouin and micro-Raman spectroscopy, Photon-Correlation Spectroscopy and Dielectric Spectroscopy, Extended frequency range Depolarized Light Scattering (EDLS), and participated to the development of a high-resolution ultraviolet Brillouin scattering setup at the Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste.

Light scattering limits the quality of optical imaging of unlabeled biospecimens: too little scattering and the sample is transparent, exhibiting low contrast, and too much scattering washes the structure information altogether. Recent advances in QPI, an approach by which the pathlength shifts induced by a specimen are mapped at each point in the field of view, allow us to connect the two regimes. We developed spatial light interference microscopy (SLIM) as a high-sensitivity, high-resolution QPI method, which open new applications for studying structure and dynamics. SLIM provides interesting data on cell growth and intracellular transport, specifically, it distinguishes between random and deterministic cargo motion. We measured subtle vesicle transport changes following optogenetic stimulation of live cells. Based on principles of holography, we developed a new optical technique for measuring cell traction. We performed simultaneous measurements of cell growth and cell-generated forces and showed their evolution during cell differentiation. However, SLIM works best for thin specimens, such as single cell layers and tissue slices. To expand this type of imaging to thick, multiply scattering media, we developed gradient light interference microcopy (GLIM). GLIM is capable of suppressing the incoherent background due to multiple scattering. We demonstrate the use of GLIM to image various samples bovine embryos and live brain slices. Intrinsic dynamic markers promise to provide information about embryo viability, prior to implantation.

Daniel M. Davis is Professor of Immunology at the University of Manchester and holds a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award. Previously, Davis was Head of Immunology at Imperial College London, South Kensington. His research, using super-resolution microscopy to study immune cell biology, was listed in Discover magazine as one of the top 100 breakthroughs of the year. His first book, The Compatibility Gene, was described by Bill Bryson in the Guardian’s Books of the Year as ‘elegantly written and unexpectedly gripping’. His second book, The Beautiful Cure, has been described by Stephen Fry as 'One of those books that makes you look at everything human in a new, challenging and thrilling way'. Davis is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Science and the author of over 120 academic papers, collectively cited over 10,000 times, including articles in Nature, Science and Scientific American.

Ulrike Endesfelder received her diploma in physics from Bonn University in 2008. She then became interested in the biophysics of single molecules and pursued a summer research stay at Waseda University, Tokyo, in 2008. She received her PhD in Biophysics at the University of Bielefeld in February 2012 and performed her postdoctoral trainings at Würzburg and Frankfurt University from 2012-2014. In October 2014, Ulrike Endesfelder moved to the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, where she is leading a research group focused on combining methods from physics and biology to understand the molecular organisation and behaviour of microbial cell biology. She also teaches biophysics undergraduate courses at the University of Marburg.

Suliana Manley graduated with honors from Rice University in 1997, with degrees in physics and mathematics. She joined the group of David Weitz for her doctoral work, completed at Harvard University, then moved down the street to MIT to do postdoctoral work in the group of Alice Gast. Her expedition into the exciting and complex world of biology and super-resolution microscopy began when she moved to the NIH to work with Jennifer-Lippincott Schwartz, as a National Research Council Fellow. In 2009, she started her own group as a professor of physics at EPFL, where she was promoted with tenure in 2016. The scientific focus of the group is on developing tools such as high-throughput and “smart” super-resolution microscopies, and using them to understand the biophysics of cellular organization and dynamics.

Suliana is the recipient of the 2019 RMS Medal for Light Microscopy, this will be presented at mmc2019.

Sebastian is a biophysicist with a main research interest in single molecule spectroscopy. He finished his PhD in Physics at Bielefeld University, Germany, in 2011 on molecular photoswitches and their use in single-molecule based super-resolution imaging. Then he moved to the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, where he applied super resolution microscopy to study different biological systems, such as the nuclear pore complex in Xenopus laevis and presynaptic proteins in Drosophila. In 2016, he started as a Lecturer at the Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde, Scotland. He aims to develop novel photoswitches, optical imaging systems, software for image processing and data analysis, and apply these tools to study cellular life.

Willy Supatto is a CNRS researcher at the Laboratory for Optics and Biosciences at Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France). He received a M.Sc. degree in Physics and Chemistry from ESPCI ParisTech (Paris, France) and a M.Sc. degree in Biophysics from Paris University. He completed his Ph.D. in Biophysics at Institut Curie in Paris. In 2006, he joined the Biological Imaging Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, Pasadena, USA) to pursue postdoctoral studies with Pr. Scott E. Fraser. He joined the École Polytechnique in 2011 as a CNRS researcher to investigate embryonic development using quantitative imaging. He developed new nonlinear microscopy, optical manipulation and image analysis tools to study symmetry breaking, fluid flow dynamics or collective cell migration in living embryos. More information:  https://portail.polytechnique.edu/lob/en/willy-supatto

Katrin Heinze is an expert in biological imaging and biophotonics. She is a physicist by training and currently Associate Professor at the University of Würzburg, where she runs her research lab and an imaging facility. She started her career working with Petra Schwille in Göttingen and Dresden “taming and tweaking” Fluorescence Correlation methods for intracellular analysis of biomolecular interactions. She received her PhD degree in 2002, and was honored by the Max-Planck Society with the Otto-Hahn-Medal for her outstanding PhD thesis. With the Max-Planck fellowship at hand, she then joined Paul Wiseman’s group at McGill University in Montreal as a Postdoc. Afterwards, Katrin Heinze started her own research group in 2006 at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria. In 2011, she returned to her home country Germany, and joined the Rudolf-Virchow-Center at the University of Würzburg as a research group leader. Her current research interests range from single molecule to whole organ imaging. Bridging physical, biological and medical research is the main strength of her work. One of her current projects involves quantitative 3D tissue imaging; high-resolution imaging without losing the context of the whole organ or organism is the challenge here. Since ‘the ideal’ method where very fine details can be captured in no time over a large field-of-view has not been invented yet, she successfully tackles this problem by complementary approaches in vitro, in vivo, and in silico involving advanced intravital two-photon, and light sheet microscopy with tweaks.

Cyrus F. Hirjibehedin is a member of Technical Staff in the Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He studies superconducting quantum systems and their applications in quantum information processing. Prior to joining MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Dr. Hirjibehedin was a Professor of Physics, Chemistry, and Nanotechnology at University College London (UCL). His research used scanning probe microscopy to understand the electronic and magnetic properties of nanometer-scale quantum structures and explore their potential applications in future paradigms of information processing, data storage, and sensing. Before moving to UCL, Dr. Hirjibehedin was a postdoctoral Research Staff Member at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in the Low-Temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Group. Working with Dr. Don Eigler and Dr. Andreas Heinrich, he studied the onset of cooperative magnetic behavior in atomically-precise low-dimensional structures. For his Ph.D. research, Dr. Hirjibehedin worked with Professor Aron Pinczuk at both Columbia University and Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies to explore novel interaction effects in low dimensional electron systems formed in semiconductor quantum structures. Results from Dr. Hirjibehedin’s work have been published in over 40 papers in leading academic journals. He has presented this work in more than 140 invited talks at international conferences and seminars, and has received a number of awards for performing high-impact research, including the Medal for Scanning Probe Microscopy from the Royal Microscopical Society and an Outstanding Innovation Award from IBM. Dr. Hirjibehedin received a B.S. in both Physics and Computer Science from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University.

Cyrus is the recipient of the 2019 RMS Medal for Scanning Probe Microscopy, this will be presented at mmc2019. Scanwel Ltd have provided Cyrus with a travel bursary to assist his attendance at mmc2019.

I was born in Italy and I obtained my first degree in Physics at the University of Pisa. Then I accomplished a D. Phil. in Materials Science at the University of Oxford. After a few years of posdoc grants in US and UK, I moved back to Italy where I worked for a few years at Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Bologna. Finally I returned with a permanent position as researcher at CNR in Pisa, where I had started my scientific carrier. Initially I have spent most of my efforts in using and developing techniques related to Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM). In particular my D. Phil. thesis has regarded the development of Ultrasonic Force Microscopy for the elastic characterization of stiff materials on the nanoscale. I have also established several collaborations where I could come across other experimental techniques (such as TEM, x-ray diffraction, XPS and tof-SIMS), which could provide complementary information to SPM data. My research has been devoted to the characterization of materials on the nanoscale. I have mainly analyzed the properties of thin oligomeric and polimeric films for applications in fields such as organic electronics and biology. More recently I have been involved in research concerning new emerging materials, from nanogels to 2D materials. One of my main interests nowadays regards the use of SPM to ‘see’ below the surface.

Olga Kazakova received the Ph.D. degree in Solid State Physics from Institute of Crystallography, Russian Academy of Science in 1996. In 1999 – 2002, she was a first postdoctoral researcher and then an Assistant Professor at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2002, she has been working at the National Physical Laboratory, where she became a Principle Research Scientist in 2010. Her research interests include functional (electronic, optical, structural) nanoscale studies of 2D materials; development of novel Scanning Microscopy techniques; novel sensors for Life Science and metrological applications. She is an author of ca 160 peer-refereed publications and had above 130 presentations at scientific conferences, e.g. ca 60 invited talks and seminars. She was a recipient of the numerous national and international awards, including Intel European Research and Innovation Award (2008), NPL Rayleigh Award and Serco Global Pulse Award (2011). She is a Fellow of Institute of Physics.

Alice Pyne is an MRC/UKRI Innovation Fellow at University College London. Alice has a decade of experience in scanning probe microscopy, spanning high-speed and high-resolution imaging, probe development and cantilever sensing. Her research interests use these technologies to determine biomolecular mechanisms of action, with a long-term view to improved development of therapeutics. Alice’s current research aims to understand how enzymes, essential for life in both humans and bacteria, interact with DNA in its complex native topologies. She exploits her high-resolution Atomic Force Microscopy techniques to visualise the interplay between topologically complex DNA and topoisomerase enzymes in real time, at sub-molecular resolution. These studies aim to reveal the mechanism-of-action of topoisomerases, which are major targets for antibiotic and anti-cancer therapeutics.

Felix Rico is Associate Professor at the department of Physics of Aix-Marseille University since 2013. His research is developed at the force microscopy group of the LAI, U1067, a joined Inserm, CNRS and Aix-Marseille University laboratory. He studied Physics and received his PhD in Biophysics in Barcelona, Spain. Before joining the faculty in Marseille, he was postdoc at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine (FL) and at Institut Curie (Paris). He has been working with atomic force microscopy (AFM) since 2001, trying to understand the mechanics and adhesion properties of biological systems. He has developed various AFM based approaches, including theoretical and instrumentation developments, to investigate the mechanical response of single biomolecules, membranes and living cells. Recently, he adapted high speed AFM (HS-AFM) to work as a force spectroscopy tool, probing the mechanics of single biomolecules and living cells at the shortest timescales.

Dimitrios Lamprou (Ph.D., MBA) is Reader in Pharmaceutical Engineering and MSc Programme Director at the School of Pharmacy in Queen's University Belfast (UK) and Visiting Researcher at University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK). Dimitrios has experience of teaching in Higher Education, conducting research (60+ publications, 200+ conference abstracts, 70+ Oral/Invited Presentations) and securing national and international funding (£2M+). He is Secretary at the United Kingdom and Ireland Controlled Release Society (UKICRS), external Ph.D. viva examiner for UK and International Institutions (15+), and referees for journals (50+ Pharmaceutical and related), publishers and research funding bodies (10+). His research and academic leadership have been recognised in a range of awards, including the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) Science Award (2017) for his “outstanding scientific contribution” in the field of Pharmaceutics. His current research involves both the study of material characteristics as well as the application of such knowledge to the design and manufacture of pharmaceutical products, including the use of state-of-the-art Nanocharacterisation Techniques (e.g. AFM, μCT, ToF-SIMS). His Group Research Interests focused on five distinct areas: Biosurface Engineering, Electrospinning, Microfluidics, Nanoanalysis, and Printing of Medicines.

Dr. Polina Prokopovich joined the Cardiff School of Pharmacy in January 2011 as Cardiff Academic Fellow. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Nanotechnology and Biomaterials, and has research interests are in the area of Materials/Biomaterials, Drug Delivery and Nanotechnology.  In particular, her research focuses on development of the targeted drug delivery for joint diseases; anti-inflammatory drug delivery systems to prevent wear particles-induced inflammation; orthopaedic antimicrobial nanocomposite bone cements; multifunctional hydrogels as bone graft materials and study of nanomechanical and surface properties of cells post exposure to metal, ceramic and polymeric wear particles. Research in Dr. Prokopovich’s group is sponsored by Wellcome Trust, Welsh Government, Innovate UK, EU funds and industries.

Dr. Sergi Garcia-Manyes is Professor of Biophysics at King’s College London, holding a joint appointment between the Randall Centre for Cell and Molecular Biophysics and the Department of Physics, where he is the Head of the Biological Physics and Soft Matter (BPSM) research group. He has also established a satellite laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute (London). Sergi obtained his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Barcelona, and conducted his postdoctoral training in the field of single molecule mechanics in the Biology Department of Columbia University in the City of New York. Sergi’s lab is interested in mechanobiology across different length-scales, spanning from single molecules to individual cells, with a particular accent on the molecular mechanisms underpinning mechanical folding of single proteins and protein mechanochemistry at the single bond level. Sergi held an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship, and has been recently awarded the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award and a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award.

Jamie obtained a degree in Physics from the University of Bristol in 1991 and a PhD in Polymer Physics from Bristol in 1996. In his early career his research was focused on understanding how synthetic polymer crystallize, using atomic force microscopy (AFM) as a primary tool. In 2001 he co-founded a spin-out company, Infinitesima Ltd, which markets high speed AFM into the semiconductor inspection market. After moving to the University of Sheffield in 2004 he started to shift towards biological physics, working on the architecture of the bacterial cell wall. His group’s current research includes developing AFM and using it to understand diverse problems in biology, including bacterial life and death, bone metastasis in breast cancer, and plant cell morphogenesis.

Milka Sarris conducted her PhD in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in Cambridge, with Alex Betz, on the formation of immunological synapses. She then did her postdoctoral work in the group of Philippe Herbomel in Institut Pasteur, Paris, where she trained in zebrafish live imaging. She also did a brief post-doctoral work with Philippe Bousso, where she started developing optogenetic approaches to study neutrophil signalling. She set up her lab as an MRC Career Development fellow in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neurroscience (PDN) in Cambridge in 2014. She was appointed Lecturer in PDN in 2016.

David Entenberg is an Associate Faculty Member of the Department of Anatomy and Structural Biology at Einstein College of Medicine. He serves as both the Director of Technological Development, and Director of Integrated Imaging within Einstein’s Gruss Lipper Biophotonics Center and Integrated Imaging Program. The mandates of the Center and Program are to study and develop novel microscopy techniques that create a bridge between basic and clinical sciences, and answer fundamental biological questions that lead to cures for biomedical problems. With a background in laser based experimental quantum physics, his expertise lies in the design and development of novel instrumentation and imaging technologies for biological research. His work has included: the design and development of novel multiphoton microscopes for imaging in live mice; novel implantable imaging windows for imaging of metastatic cancer in the mammary glands and the lungs of live mice; and several image analysis software packages to facilitate the analysis of cell motility, colocalization image data, and automated digital pathology based analyses for biomarkers of cancer metastasis. He has authored numerous publications and book chapters on multiphoton microscopy and live animal imaging and is a lecturer at Einstein’s Quantitative Imaging of Cells course. 

Dr Lo Celso graduated from Torino University in Italy. She obtained her PhD from UCL, working with Fiona Watt at the CRUK London Research Institute, where she studied epidermal stem cells. She started performing intravital microscopy of the haematopoietic stem cell (HSC) niche during her postdoctoral training at Harvard University with David Scadden. In 2009 she started her independent research group at Imperial College London, where she is now a reader in the department of Life Sciences, and network lead of the Imperial Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Network. Dr Lo Celso recently established a satellite laboratory at the Sir Francis Crick Institute. Her research aims to understand the mechanisms regulating HSC function during steady state and during stress, such as infections, leukaemia and transplantation. Her interdisciplinary approach combines mouse bone marrow intravital microscopy techniques, computational image analysis, molecular profiling and mathematical modelling of the HSC niche. Dr Lo Celso is the first woman to receive the Foulkes Medal award (2017), received the ISEH New Investigator award in 2017, and presented the DGZ Carl Zeiss Lecture 2018.  

Cristina is the recipient of the 2019 RMS Medal for Life Sciences, this will be presented at mmc2019.

Olivier Theodoly is research director at the French national center for Research (CNRS). He got a PhD in physics of fluids at the Collège de France, Paris (1999). As a post-doc in UC Berkeley (2001-2001) and as a CNRS researcher (assistant professor) in a joined laboratory between the CNRS, the company Solvay Inc and Princeton University (2002-2006), he worked in chemical engineering on polymerization, polymers at interfaces, wetting, and colloidal stability.  He returned to France in 2006 and started novel thematic in biophysics in collaboration with the medical school in Marseilles. He developed methods optical nanoscopy and microfluidics for the quantitative analysis of living cell rheology and migration. His current research focuses on the mechanisms of cell guiding by mechanical and chemical cues. He became CNRS research director (professor) in 2015 and director of the Laboratory Adhesion and Inflammation in 2016.

Holger Stark studied Biochemistry at the Free University in Berlin and did his PhD at the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck-Society in Berlin working on the cryo-EM 3D structure analysis of the ribosome. He then moved to Imperial College London as a postdoc and became a group leader after moving to the University of Marburg, Germany, focusing on structural studies of snRNPs and spliceosomes. In 2000 he then moved to Göttingen where he first became an independent group leader and later a professor at the University of Göttingen. Since 2016 he is a director of the department for Structural Dynamics at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. The major focus of the department is to study structures of large and dynamic macromolecular complexes and to develop biochemical, electron microscopical and image processing methods to improve single particle cryo-EM of challenging macromolecular complexes.

Werner Kühlbrandt studied chemistry and crystallography at the Free University Berlin, and biochemistry and biophysics at King’s College London. In 1981 he obtained his PhD with Nigel Unwin at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, investigating the structure of two-dimensional ribosome crystals by electron microscopy. As a postdoc, he turned to structural studies of membrane proteins, first at the ETH Zürich, and then at Imperial College London. In 1988 he became a research group leader at EMBL Heidelberg, Germany, where he determined the high-resolution structure of the plant light-harvesting complex LHC-II by cryoEM. Since 1997 he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, where his department of Structural Biology studies large membrane protein complexes by single-particle cryoEM, electron cryo-tomography and x-ray crystallography.

Wanda Kukulski studied biology at the University of Basel, where she also did her PhD at the Biozentrum. During this time, she solved the structure of a water channel protein by electron crystallography. For her postdoc, she worked at the EMBL in Heidelberg where she developed a correlative microscopy workflow and applied it to visualise how the plasma membrane reshapes during endocytosis. Currently Wanda leads a group in the Cell Biology Division of the MRC LMB. Her group studies how membrane architecture is linked to cellular functions, with a current focus on the organisation of organelle contact sites and the dynamics of mitochondrial membranes. To this end, they combine various cellular imaging techniques including correlative microscopy and electron cryo-tomography.

Wanda is the recipient of the 2019 RMS Alan Agar Medal for Electron Microscopy, this will be presented at mmc2019.

Dr. Gaia Pigino received her PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Siena, Italy in 2007 for her studies on bio-indicators for contaminated soil. Electron microscopy (EM), one of the tools she used for this work, quickly became the central method for her research ever since. After her first postdoc in the EM Lab of the Department of Evolutionary Biology in Siena, she moved to ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherer Institute in Switzerland and was awarded an EMBO fellowship to continue her work on the cryo-EM structural analysis of ciliary components. In 2012, Dr. Pigino started her own lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany. The work of her lab is centered around the question how complex cellular machines self-organize. Cilia remain the main focus, where the Pigino Lab investigates fundamental functional aspects of the dynamic process required for the assembly of the cilium. Learning about self-organization and functional implications of structural aspects naturally requires to combine and further the latest imaging technologies (3D cryo-EM, tomography, correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM), and various light microscopy techniques) with tools from biochemistry, in vitro reconstitution, and genetic engineering.

Dr Tim Burnett is a Lecturer in Materials Imaging at The University of Manchester and also Deputy Director of the Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility. He has been developing ways of connecting different 3D imaging tools, with an emphasis on correlating X-ray computed tomography and electron microscopy to understand the degradation and failure of metal alloys. He has a particular interest in developing new workflows for imaging across scales and across modalities, a process termed correlative tomography when considering 3D imaging techniques, and has been applying this approach to a range of different use cases from Materials Science, Biology and Geology. Dr Tim Burnett started his research career at the University of Leeds in 2004 where during his PhD he synthesized, for the first time, single crystals of the multiferroic material BiFeO3-PbTiO3. Dr Burnett then moved to the Materials Division at The National Physical Laboratory, the UK's National Measurement Institute, before then starting a joint position with FEI company (now ThermoFisher) and The University of Manchester before his current appointment.

Louise Hughes is the Product Manager for Life Sciences at Oxford Instruments. Prior to this she was the facility manager of the Oxford Brookes University Bioimaging unit. Louise specialises in 3D electron microscopy and has been in the field for 19 years. Her research focus is on optimising biological sample preparation, methodology and imaging techniques across a wide range of sample types. She has extensive experience in SBFSEM, array tomography, electron tomography and 3D data reconstruction. Her current work involves applying EDS to biological samples.   

Dr.Doan was trained as a medical doctor and did PhD in molecular cell biology in University of Debrecen, Hungary. He did his first postdoc in microbiology in Pasteur Institute, Paris, France for nearly 2 years to study functional genomics in infectious diseases. From 2016 until now, he joined Dr. Anne Carpenter's Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, leading the effort to analyze Imaging flow cytometric data in clinical studies. His research now focuses on developing machine learning methodology, especially deep learning, to automate the analytic processing of single cell images in biological and clinical applications.

Anna received a Diploma in Mathematics at the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2003. After graduation, she worked as a scientific programmer in CERN, mostly on the mathematical and statistical parts of the ROOT framework. In 2008, Anna started her PhD at the Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing at the University of Heidelberg, in the lab of Fred Hamprecht. She then stayed at the lab as a PostDoc, working in collaboration with HHMI Janelia Research Campus through the Janelia visiting scientist program. In July 2018 Anna started her own research group at EMBL Heidelberg, working on automation of image analysis through methods of machine learning.

Virginie Uhlmann is leading a Bioimage Analysis research group at EMBL-EBI in Cambridge, UK. She received her Master degree in Bioengineering (2012) and her Ph.D in Electrical Engineering (2017) from the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland). Her work focuses on bioimage analysis, specifically on the development of continuous mathematical models to characterise and quantify biological objects based on image data. Her research interests include approximation, information and interpolation theory, image processing, computer vision, machine learning and life sciences. She is an associate member of the Bio Imaging and Signal Processing technical committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Florian Jug is a research group leader at the Center for System Biology Dresden (CSBD) and the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG). The overarching goal of his research is to push the boundaries of what image analyses and machine learning can do to quantitatively analyze biological (image)-data. Research in the Jug Lab aims at finding novel ways to efficiently analyze large amounts of microscopy data, while avoiding impossible amounts of manual analyses and curation tasks – often a major bottleneck in biomedical research. Besides finding novel algorithms and machine learning methods, the Jug Lab is also critically involved in the development of Fiji, a popular and widely applicable open software platform for biomedical image analysis and an ideal way to disseminate newly developed methods and tools.

Gabriella Rustici is Associate Director of Training for HDR UK; in this role she is responsible for shaping HDR UK training strategy through designing, implementing and evaluating effective and scalable solutions to educate health data scientists and practitioners at all career stages.  She is also the Head of the Bioinformatics Training Programme of the University of Cambridge’s School of Biological Sciences, which provides advanced training in bioinformatics and data science, from undergraduate to continuing professional development. Gabriella brings an international perspective to her work, through her role as co-lead of the ELIXIR Training Platform where she is responsible for devising a sustainable strategy for building bioinformatics training capacity across Europe, working in partnership with a network of professionals spread across 20 European countries.

Shoaib leads the Institute's community engagement activities and strategies. Graduating in Computer Science from the University of Manchester in 1997, he has worked in the commercial sector as a systems programmer and then as software developer, metadata architect and eventually a project manager at the Science and Facilities Technologies Council (STFC).

Shoaib has specific interest in building, managing and sustaining high-performance teams, distributed agile project management and the promotion of technical best practice in software products for use in research. He is a project manager by practice and training (holding a PMI PMP), and also serves in this capacity with the eScience Lab at the University of Manchester.

His work at the Institute includes coordinating its Fellowship Programme, a network of researchers who act as ambassadors of better research software practice to their domains and organisations by organising workshops related to research software and attending relevant workshops and conferences in their areas of work. Shoaib also leads the Institute's annual Collaborations Workshop(CW) which brings together researchers, developers, funders, managers and more to explore hot topics in research software all within an engaging unconferenceinspired format.

B. Layla Mehdi is currently an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Imaging Center at the University of Liverpool (ICaL), UK. She received her Master’s in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Warsaw, Poland and her Ph. D. in Chemistry from Miami University, USA working in the area of electrochemical detectors coupled with gas chromatography for cancer therapy. Following her Ph.D., in 2013 she joined the Physical Sciences Directorate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as a postdoctoral research associate and in 2016 was promoted to Staff Scientist. Her work at PNNL involved the development of an in-situ stage to study dynamic processes in next generation batteries with applications to Li-ion and beyond Li chemistries being supported as part of the Joint Centre for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) funded by the US Department of Energy.  She has received numerous international awards for this work, including the 2015 MRS postdoctoral award, the 2015 Microscopy Society of America postdoctoral award and the 2014 Microscopy & Microanalysis Presidential award. In 2016 she also received JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship to perform Research at Nagoya University, Japan in collaboration with TOYOTA Japan. She has over 20 publications in the development and application of low-dose methods to the operando and high resolution study of beam sensitive materials and processes. She has organized 4 international in-situ liquid TEM workshops, an international in-situ TEM symposium, has given over 25 invited talks at international meetings and institutions, and is the Associate Editor covering in-situ TEM for the SpringerNature journal, Advanced Structural and Chemical Imaging. Currently, her research group focuses on developing advanced new microscopy methods to generate an in depth understanding of reaction kinetics at solid/liquid and solid/gas interfaces in batteries, electrocatalysts and pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Willinger studied physics at the Technical University in Vienna, Austria and did his master in the field of electron energy loss spectroscopy and DFT simulation of the electronic structure under the supervision of Prof. Peter Schattschneider and Prof. Robert Schlögl, Director of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry at the Fritz-Haber-Institute (FHI) of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. Dr. Willinger obtained his PhD from the Technical University in Berlin for the investigation of the electronic structure of vanadium phosphorous oxides. After a 1.5 years post-doc at the Fritz-Haber-Institute, he moved to the University of Aveiro in Portugal, where he worked as an independent researcher for 4 years. In 2011 he went back to the Fritz-Haber-Institute as group leader for electron microscopy. Since 01.02.2018 he has been at the “Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule” (ETH) in Zürich, where he is focusing on the development and implementation of in-situ electron microscopy techniques.

Joe Patterson in an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. He completed his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Warwick, UK, in 2013, working under the supervision of Professor Rachel O’Reilly. He went on to work for Professor Nathan C. Gianneschi and Professor Kimberly Prather at the University of California San Diego, USA, and the Centre for Aerosol Impacts on Climate and Environment (CAICE) as a postdoctoral scholar. In 2016, he joined the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, working in the Laboratory of Materials and Interface Chemistry led by Professor Nico Sommerdijk. Joe’s research interests involve the development of new materials through a deep understanding of their structure and dynamics. He has a strong focus on understanding soft matter formation mechanisms using a combination of cryogenic and liquid phase electron microscopy. He is a recipient of the Domino/MacroGroupUK Young Polymer Scientist award, the Jon Weaver PhD prize, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual fellowship.

Deb Kelly completed her PhD in Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University and her post-doctoral training in Structural Biology at Harvard Medical School. During these pursuits, she developed technical breakthroughs in the field of cryo-EM that are now being used by the in situ TEM community. As interest in situ TEM has skyrocketed in recent years, the Kelly team has been on the leading-edge of adapting this technology for biomedical applications, in particular cancer research. Dr. Kelly is currently a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, where the holds the Lloyd and Dottie Foehr Huck Chair in Molecular Biophysics and directs the Center for Structural Oncology (CSO). The CSO focuses on combating the molecular culprits that fuel human cancer while revealing the hidden enemies that cancer cells use to outsmart modern medicine. 

Dr. Joseph Michael is a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM where he works in the Material, Physical, and Chemical Sciences Center.  He received his BS, MS and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering form Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA.  Prior to his employment at Sandia National Laboratories, Dr. Michael was employed as a Senior Research Engineer at Bethlehem Steel’s Homer Research Laboratories.  Dr. Michael’s current research focuses on the use of electron and ion beams for the characterization of materials utilizing high resolution imaging, elemental microanalysis and crystallography.  Dr. Michael has published over 200 papers in this area and is a co-author of the leading textbook on scanning electron microscopy. Dr. Michael is a Fellow of the Microscopy Society of America and of Alpha Sigma Mu of ASM.  He has been the recipient of numerous awards including: The Burton Medal presented by Microscopy Society of America, the Grossman Award presented by ASM, the Duncumb Award and the Presidential Science Award presented by the Microanalysis Society and the Hanawalt Award presented by the International Center for Diffraction Data. 

Dr. Nabil Bassim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at McMaster Univesity specializing in electron and ion-based microscopy. Materials systems of interest include all length scales, from 2-D materials to concrete and automotive materials. He is interested in developing novel applications of focused ion beam instrumentation to explore novel physical phenomena. A recent interest has been to integrate image processing algorithms with advanced microscopes to accelerate materials characterization.  Prior to his arrival at McMaster in 2016, he was a Materials Research Engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, where he arrived as a postdoc in 2003. He hold a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Florida and graduated magna cum laude (Mechanical Engineering) from the University of South Florida in 1997. He organizes the FIB-SEM User group meeting (ww.fibsem.net), the largest standalone FIB meeting in North America.

Dr Amalio Fernández-Pacheco is an EPSRC Early Career Fellow at the Materials and Condensed Matter Physics group within the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow (UK). He was previously working at Zaragoza (Spain), Imperial College London and at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Amalio investigates new effects in 3D magnetic nanostructures for spintronic applications. His main research activities comprise the development of novel 3D nano-patterning processes, chiral effects in multi-layered heterostructures and advanced nano-magnetometry and magnetic microscopy for characterisation of 3D nanostructures. He is recognised worldwide as one of the pioneers in the fabrication of magnetic systems using Focused Electron Beam Induced Deposition, a direct-write nanofabrication method carried out in electron microscopes. Among his awards, he received in 2010 the Springer Theses award in recognition of his PhD work and a Marie Curie Fellowship, and in 2017 his group received the Cavendish Laboratory Abdus Salam Prize. In 2014 he became EPSRC Fellow, Winton Advanced Fellow and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College Cambridge. Recently, he has been an invited speaker at leading magnetic and physics conferences such as ICMFS-2018, MMM-2017 and APS March Meeting-2017, as well as in a TedX event. He has  also acted as Programme Committee member of conferences such as MMM-2016 and ICM-2018. In 2020, he will chair the 8th International workshop on Focused Electron Beam-Induced Processing (FEBIP) taking place in Glasgow.

Annalena Wolff is a research infrastructure specialist for Focused Ion Beams at the Institute for Future Environments at the Queensland University of Technology, where she is responsible for the helium ion microscope (HIM), a FIB/SEM and a plasma focused ion beam. Lena studied at Bielefeld University and received her Ph.D. degree in Physics in 2014 before moving to Australia where she worked at the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy. Lena was recruited to the Queensland University of Technology in 2015 and has established herself there as an expert in focused ion beams across several platforms. She has lead several pre-conference workshops on FIB/HIM techniques  and completed a HIM world tour where she built networks in 4 continents over 11 weeks. Lena’s research interests include: developing new approaches to SEM/FIB and HIM applications, ion-solid interactions, fabrication of 2D and 3D micro/nanostructures, sample characterization and 3D tomography.

Professor in materials science and engineering at Swansea University in the UK. Co-Director of the £10M Advanced Imaging of Materials (AIM) facility at Swansea, of the £13.7M Materials and Manufacturing Academy for postgraduate training, and the STFC Regional Beamline-Bridging Facility. Founder and Director of the Research as Art awards, which have reached over 50 million people worldwide since 2009, A Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, and a previous British Science Association Media Fellow at Nature. Written for Nature, Scientific American, The Guardian, Huffington Post. Contributed to and appeared on TV and radio, including the BBC Horizon programme.

Virginie Chamard is director of research at CNRS and head of the COMiX team at Institut Fresnel in Marseille France. She graduated in Physics at Grenoble University and obtained her PhD thesis in 2000, in hard-condensed matter science before joining the European Synchrotron Source and Dortmund University for her post-doctoral internships. She got an associated researcher position at CNRS in 2003, with the aim of developing X-ray coherent diffraction imaging microscopy to investigate complex crystalline materials.

Those last years, she focused on the development of a novel crystalline microscopy she originally proposed in 2011: Bragg ptychography. This approach is now optimized and offered to users of major synchrotron sources for material science applications.

In 2016, she got awarded by the European Research Council and obtained an ERC grant to develop new crystalline microscopies, both for x-rays and optics. She uses these approaches to progress on the understanding of the crystallisation processes of biominerals, with the aim of finally proposing relevant biomineralization models.

Dr. De Hoog is a Research Fellow in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh and a staff member of the Edinburgh Ion Microprobe Facility. He has an MSc in Geochemistry from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he also did a PhD on the behaviour of volatiles in arc volcanism in Indonesia. He then did postdoctoral research in Ottawa, Canada, before moving to Gothenburg, Sweden, to be laser ablation-ICP-MS lab manager. Here his research focus shifted to ultrahigh pressure metamorphic rocks and mantle petrology. After a few years at Oxford University running the magnetic sector ICP-MS lab, he moved to Edinburgh in 2009, where he stayed ever since. His current research interests are the cycle of volatile elements and their isotopes in subduction zones and the deep Earth, and in particular the use of in-situ measurements by SIMS.

Dr Jennifer Murgatroyd is a senior geomaterials scientist with the Materials & Structures Department at RSK Environment. Jennifer is a trained archaeological scientist with over 15 years’ experience investigating structures and building materials from high-profile sites in Pompeii, Rome and Ostia, Italy, as well as many nationally listed historic buildings across the UK. She completed her D.Phil at St. Cross College, Oxford in 2016, researching ancient Roman concretes. She is an affiliate member of the IHBC and an honorary visiting researcher at the Department of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford.

Henrik Birkedal obtained his PhD with honors from Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, followed by a postdoc at University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2004, he was awarded a stipend to establish his own research program at Aarhus University where he is now an associate professor and leads a research group within the area of biological and bioinspired materials. Of special interest is the structure of bone at length scales below ~10 µm including the osteocyte lacuno-canalicular network and the properties and organization of bone biominerals. These are chiefly studied by synchrotron X-ray imaging techniques including nanotomography and multimodal tomographies such as X-ray fluorescence tomography and diffraction/scattering computed tomography; the continuous improvement of these methods is an additional area of interest.

Dr. Natalie Reznikov is a skeletal biologist, and she holds a PhD in Structural Biology from The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. She has completed two postdoctoral fellowships, one in biomedical engineering at Imperial College London, UK, and the other in skeletal pathology at McGill University, Canada. The overarching theme of her research is structure-function relationships in bone in health and disease. She has studied the architecture of bone using 3D tomographic imaging methods that span size scales ranging from atoms to entire skeletons. Her work has revised the concept of the hierarchical organization of bone, described order and chaos in bone collagen assembly, and she developed an algorithm for analyzing trabecular bone topology. Currently, she is an applications specialist at Object Research Systems Inc. (Montreal) for image processing and analysis software (Dragonfly^TM) for multimodal tomography.

Febe van Maldegem obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam working on B cells and their Immunoglobulin receptors in health and disease. After a first postdoc at the LMB in Cambridge, she is now in the lab of Julian Downward at The Francis Crick Institute in London. Here she is using flow cytometry and Imaging Mass Cytometry to study the interactions of tumours with the tumour infiltrating immune cells, for various immunogenic and non-immunogenic models of Kras-mutated lung cancer. She is interested in how oncogene signaling influences TME organisation and how this gets perturbed by intervention with various targeted drugs.

Dr. Dario Bressan graduated in Molecular Biology and Neurobiology from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy, in 2008. He then moved to the USA, where he obtained a PhD from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, working with Dr Greg Hannon.  During his Ph.D he worked on brain connectivity mapping, and developed tools to use light as a tag to selectively purify proteins, RNA and DNA from specific parts of a tissue with high resolution. He then moved to the CRUK Cambridge Institute as a research associate, developing tools for in-situ transcriptomics. Since 2017 he is the head of IMAXT laboratory, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the CRUK Cambridge Institute acting as one of the hubs for the “Imaging and Molecular Annotation of Xenografts and Tumours” project, a large effort funded by a CRUK Grand Challenge grant aimed at the development of an integrated set of tools, including in-situ transcriptomics and proteomics, whole-organ imaging and genomics, that will be used to produce 3-dimensional deeply annotated atlases of tumours and investigate the role of tumour heterogeneity and the tumour micro-environment in cancer progression and treatment.